


honey, you are nothing to me

by allmyloyaldead (van1lla_v1lla1n)



Category: Succession (TV 2018)
Genre: (in the classical sense), Alcohol, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Boss/Employee Relationship, Classical References, Drug Use, Explicit Sexual Content, Hand Feeding, Infidelity, M/M, Misgendering, No Pedophilia, Other, Pederasty, Season 1 adjacent, body discussions, brief homophobia/transphobia, but with some timeline fuckery, canonical character ages, genderqueer!Greg
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-26
Updated: 2021-03-15
Packaged: 2021-03-17 22:14:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 24,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29724003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/van1lla_v1lla1n/pseuds/allmyloyaldead
Summary: genderqueer Greg. same old Tom. an ill-advised arrangement.In the name of expanding their business mentorship, Tom and Greg concoct a pederasty arrangement. It’s like a FWB thing, but business-y, and with strict boundaries, which, Tom is convinced, a) mean he’s not cheating on his fiancée and b) will absolutely prevent this from becoming anything more serious.[edit 3/15/21: update today is a new chapter 8, the penultimate chapter. the final chapter, "the beginning," is the same. apologies for out-of-order posting!]
Relationships: Greg Hirsch/Tom Wambsgans, Siobhan "Shiv" Roy/Tom Wambsgans
Comments: 41
Kudos: 26





	1. the end

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "He saw from their faces, as from the faces of his clerks and his partners, that they had never known real joy. Society had catered for them too completely. They had never struggled, and only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love." —E.M. Forster, _Maurice_
> 
> [[Please see chapter endnotes for a content note re: pederasty]]

“Hey, Tom!” _Fucking Greg_. Tom had gone on a run in this damp awful cold to start off his last day unmarried. Greg was the last fucking person he wanted to see.

“Hey, hey! See you,” Tom said. Whose fucking car was Greg getting out of anyway? Greg thought he could just spend the night with someone—spend the night _somewhere_ else, and then show up like this, like things were normal? Whatever _normal_ meant, for them. Tom started jogging again, hoping Greg would fuck off and stop swanning around in that obnoxiously femme-fatale coat and the fucking cigarette pants.

“Hey, wait up!” Greg ran to catch up with him.

“Morning, Greg!” Tom said. He stopped, resigned himself to a conversation, looked around. No one else was even awake yet after the early-arrivals party last night, but it felt rather fucked to talk to Greg publicly, here, now. The day before his wedding. When Greg, despite Tom’s better judgment, was in the wedding party. Tom was trying to forget about Greg, about everything he and Greg had done, and here Greg was rubbing himself in Tom’s face.

“Look—Tom,” Greg stuttered, nervous. And what was this, some kind of love confession? Now? “I, uh, didn’t know . . . like, exactly how to tell you this, and I’ve been up all night trying to think exactly how to broach . . . So I want to just say that . . . that . . . I think that Shiv is—”

“No,” Tom said, backing away. Not what he wanted to hear, not who he wanted to hear it from, not today.

“I think she’s having an affair.”

“No,” Tom said. “You’re wrong.”

“No, I mean, not . . .”

“Shut up, Greg. Shut up.” Tom wanted to put a hand over his mouth, but he didn’t dare touch.

“No, because I . . .” Greg whined, his feeble attempt at a defense tapering off.

“You are. You’re wrong.” God, if he could just get Greg to shut the fuck up. Tom backed up again, and Greg stepped forward to match him, holding up his hands placatingly.

“Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m wrong,” Greg said.

“You _are_ wrong, so we’re all good. Thank you for your time.” Tom turned as if to run off, but Greg kept on, reached out like he was going to grab Tom’s forearm.

“Yeah,” Greg said. “And you don’t want to hear . . . alright.”

“I don’t want to hear anything, Greg, ’cause it was a misunderstanding.”

“Tom. I saw what I saw.” And there was that classic Gregory petulance. Greg, the petulant pestilence. Greg, who just couldn’t stay away, couldn’t keep his big-bass fucking mouth shut.

“Shut up. I just said shut up. Shut the fuck up,” Tom said.

“All right, but I think you should know . . . I’m just trying to help you.”

“Shut up, will you? Fucking shut up.” Tom shoved him then, just a little, his hands on Greg’s chest for half a burning second too long. After that Greg finally started to back off, and Tom stalked after him.

“Dude! What the hell?”

“I told you to fucking shut up, will you?” Tom said. Greg was prey now, a frightened little animal, and Tom the clumsy, arrogant bear he’d surprised in the woods. Tom wrapped an arm around Greg’s neck, the nearest thing to an embrace they’d ever had, but he shoved forward, wrestling Greg to the ground. Greg’s hands scrabbled feebly at Tom’s wrists as Tom pinned him down.

“Get off of me,” Greg said. But wasn’t this what Greg had been begging him for for months? Tom stared down at Greg, aware that they were face to face, inches apart, in a position Tom had intentionally avoided for their entire relationship. If you could even call it that— _for the duration of their arrangement_.

He could’ve kissed Greg then, if he’d wanted to, and even if Greg hated it, Tom didn’t think he would have been able to push him off. But Greg looked up at him beseeching and sad and Tom knew he wouldn’t hate it and that made everything so much worse.

 _Would you kiss me?_ Tom had asked, ages ago. He’d never gotten an answer, and he’d never asked again.

“Just shut up,” Tom said, pushing off Greg’s shoulders to stand, stalling out a few steps away, looking down at him.

Greg sat up. “What the fuck, man?” he asked, hands on his knees.

Tom looked away. “Rehearsal dinner’s at seven. Fuck around with the waitstaff all you want until then, but don’t be fucking late. You’re in the wedding party.” Tom glanced back at Greg just long enough to see his chin set back, offended, and then he jogged back to the house.

The rest of the day was an awful mélange of last-minute preparations and greeting guests—Tom’s parents, his college friends, all people for whom he had to pretend to be happy. He projected Tom in love, Tom finally marrying up, marrying the love of his life.

When he saw Shiv, when he wasn’t liaising between the wedding planner and the vendors and the guests and on and on, he couldn’t feel comfortable. He tried to smile at her, tried to be excited about the wedding in a way that would be catching. She was off plotting with Gil Eavis and some other analyst most of the time, but she smiled back at him sweetly when she saw him, every time stepping minutely away from the other analyst.

But another time she didn’t see him, and he saw the way the other man stared at the side of her face when she bent over a tablet next to him, the way he set his hand, light and familiar, on the small of her back as he leaned in to share a confidence. He thought of the campaign trips she’d taken, her interview day in New Mexico. He thought about the bite mark on her thigh, weeks before. He thought about checking this man’s teeth to see if they matched that bruise; he thought of ripping those teeth right out of the man’s mouth.

And then he hated himself for that, wondering what Shiv would think if she knew about his own transgressions. If she would hate her own cousin the way Tom wanted to hate this man. Of course it hurt, to see that passing familiarity of his bride with someone else, but he’d expected it, in ways. And at once it made him feel better about his own infidelity. Their mutual guilt, the lower likelihood that Shiv had been upholding some ideal Tom hadn’t managed to live up to, made it easier.

Maybe they could find new trust, a new beginning, in that. If he could talk to her—if he could tell her what he’d done, and if she could manage to do the same, then maybe this whole thing wasn’t fucked.

Later she reminded him she still wanted to hear about his _special secret_ —the one he’d tried to tell her about months ago but that she hadn’t been interested in hearing about then. It seemed it was useful to her now, the utility of the fact giving her more a reason to listen than Tom’s own need for counsel or commiseration ever had. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to tell her, if he could trust whoever ultimately wanted the dirt on the company, whether that was Shiv or Gil or her analyst or someone else entirely. He didn’t want to upset Shiv, but he also didn’t want to lose his job, or worse get locked up in some disloyalters’ prison, which would be his due if the Cruises shit went truly public.

But he wanted to trust Shiv so badly. And she’d promised she’d protect him. Maybe, after everything, confiding in her would make her more likely to forgive his other breaks of her trust. Maybe he should just tell her all of it—about his arrangement with Greg and the Cruises shit and everything. At the very least the felony level of the corporate malfeasance might distract from his relatively minor and arguably unbelievable acts of infidelity.

He thought it through, and he thought he had it all settled in his head, and then he saw Greg. Drifting. Elbowing Kendall, trying to get him to laugh at some stupid joke. Sharing a cigarette with a waiter. Pretending not to stare at Tom from the edge of a room, as if he was having to work to keep himself from asking if Tom needed any help. Any other day Greg would’ve asked, would’ve been there with him running little errands, making things easier. Instead he was with other people, not talking to him at all, and Tom felt his face liven with rage every time he had to see it.

He couldn’t stop replaying in his head his fight with Greg in the snow. He regretted not kissing Greg then, not fucking him there in the snow one first and last time. He regretted being such a bastard, at the end. But they both knew that’s not what their arrangement had been about. Greg was there to be fucked, albeit with boundaries, to serve, and to learn—or at least to be taught.

He wanted to regret the whole affair entirely, but on some level he knew he’d regret it more if he hadn’t gone through with it. He’d be a worse person, first of all—even more closed-minded than he was now. Less patient, maybe. Less generous, definitely. But certainly less duplicitous as well. So no, he didn’t regret it for that reason, not really, but he did regret it because it fucking hurt now.

It hurt to see Greg with other people—or just without him, honestly—worse than it hurt to see Shiv with other people. Shiv hadn’t needed him for a long time, but he’d never been around a version of Greg that wasn’t reliant on him in some way. He’d fostered that element of their relationship, afraid to lose it in a way he never had been with Shiv. Maybe with Shiv he’d just seen it coming.

In the early afternoon, when preparations were quieting down and people were disappearing to dress for the rehearsal dinner, Tom noticed Greg slip out, too, toward his room. _It doesn’t matter. I don’t care_ , he thought _._ And that not-caring was what let him act—if he didn’t care, it wouldn’t matter if he fucked Greg. Is it really cheating if you don’t care, if it’s just recreational, if your fiancée is doing it too? (On some level Tom knew it was, but he didn’t care to entertain that part of himself just then, while he was pinballing from jealousy to jealousy and ache to ache, and didn’t know how to soothe any of them.)

He sipped from a half-full champagne flute, forgotten from lunch on one of the tables, and the next time his ego checked in, his id was taking him down the hall toward Greg’s room. He knocked and pushed through the doorway the moment Greg opened the door, confused.

“Hey hey, Greg. Down to bone?” Tom asked. He turned back toward Greg, crossed his arms over his chest. Greg leaned back against the door as he closed it.

“What? Tom. What?”

“I said, are you down to bone, Gregory? You’ve been begging me to fuck you for ages, so here I fucking am, Greg. Do you want it or not?”

“Yeah, on your wedding night, Tom? Your wedding eve? We couldn’t have done this before now?”

“What, you’re not down for a little last hurrah, Greg? Consider it my bachelor party, yeah? Zero rats’ asses given, by anyone involved.”

“Yeah, but, like, you had a bachelor party, dude. And you got sucked off by someone else.”

“Oh, fuck off, Greg. Don’t act like you didn’t get yours. Look. You wanna get dicked down or not? Last chance, buddy.”

Greg stared at him for a minute, eyes narrowed, mouth hanging open. “I’m gonna shower. Okay? Like, half an hour. Thirty minutes. If you’re still out here when I get done, then, like . . . Yeah. Okay.”

“Fine. Whatever. Enjoy your me time, Gregory.”

Tom took off his jacket and pants and sat down on Greg’s bed while he waited. He laid back and stared at the ceiling, already bored and antsy about the time—he had a few hours until he really needed to start dressing for dinner, but still, he’d been on all day, sifting through checklists, and now he just had to sit here and wait? Most of all he dreaded the rising emotions that threatened to spill over his dam of compulsive behavior. Maybe that was Greg’s intention, to punish him, to force him to think about all the shit he’d fucked up. But the white noise of the shower and the repeating pattern on the ceiling and his desperate desire just to avoid lulled him to sleep.

He woke up to a warm damp body curling around his back, a hand brushing his hip, breath and his own name on the back of his neck. Tom rolled over and kissed Greg before he could beg for an explanation, for reassurance, and Greg let him do it. Greg was naked still from the shower, and Tom’s hand shook as he let it drift from Greg’s hip up to her chest, rubbing her collarbone, thumbing her nipple. Greg arched her back and slung one thigh over Tom’s, pulling Tom’s knee up between her legs, shifting her hips forward to grind against him.

“Missed you,” Greg said.

Tom gritted his teeth. _I don’t care._ “I don’t have a condom,” he said.

“I don’t either. I haven’t been with anyone since, um, you—since the arrangement, though. I mean, I spent the night? Like, with one of the waiters? Last night. But we didn’t, I mean—”

“I don’t need all the details right now, Greg.”

“I mean, it was just friendly. No, um, inter-slash-outer-course. So. So if that’s—then, it’s fine. On my end.”

Tom shook his head, shook Greg’s head by a loose handful of hair. “Okay. Okay. Me either. So we’re good. Yeah?”

Tom leaned back in for a kiss but Greg stopped him with a hand on his chest. “I’m—my apologies, like, for asking? But, Shiv? Is she—because, like, I know you didn’t want to hear that, but I think she—”

“I haven’t been with Shiv, Greg. Since the arrangement. Just you.”

“So, but—what about the bachelor party, though?”

“Oh, fuck off, Greg. So I had that one blowjob. You sucked me off after that and I didn’t hear a word about it then. And now—what? You want me to list off every sexual liaison I’ve had?”

“Well, to be fair, Tom, you didn’t give me a whole lot of time to think about it at the time. But yes, actually? Like, that is kind of the point of the exercise? I don’t need specifics or whatever, but—”

“Fine. Jesus. Well, that’s it. I had the little bachelor party thing. One little blowjob that wasn’t from you. There’s no need to get all worked up about it. That’s it. I haven’t been with Shiv. I haven’t fucked my own fiancée since we initiated our little arrangement. Okay, Greg? Do you want me to say it again? Do you want me to hire a fucking blimp and send it across the sky on the morning of my wedding?”

“No. I don’t. Sorry.” Greg touched his face, and Tom wanted to jerk away like a child but he let himself lean into it instead. Tom rubbed Greg’s chest, her decolletage, that bony space between sweet boy tits, and closed his eyes and let himself feel everything. He let Greg push him over, unbutton his shirt, rub her face all over Tom’s chest, and Tom held Greg’s head as she licked at Tom’s nipple, half-dissociated and seeing it all like a scene from an old, distant dream.

When Tom licked up the seam of her, from her ass to the head of her cock, Greg’s soft high sounds went to his head faster than that afternoon champagne. Tom slipped his fingers inside her, kneeling between her legs, and then Greg pulled him down by the shoulders, out of patience. It was so easy to relent, after months of resisting, to let the head of his cock catch at Greg’s ass, to give in and let himself press inside, the first and last time.

Tom bit the pillow next to Greg’s head until Greg grabbed his face and kissed him thorough, one hand on Tom’s cheek and the other on his ass, holding him in and still. And then there were Greg’s hands on his back, Greg’s thighs around his ribs, Greg’s teeth on his neck, and an ache in his shoulder, his knees slipping down, his tongue on the smooth skin of her armpit and her dick in his hand. Tom murmured _good girl_ as Greg arched her back underneath him, thrusting up into Tom’s hand, and Greg choked on her breath against Tom’s ear as she came. Tom followed soon after, pulling out to mix their cum on Greg’s belly.

Tom didn’t let himself lie down after, just knelt there, feeling the bend in his knees and the cooling sweat on his chest. He reached down and spread cum up Greg’s chest, over her tits, and Greg caught his wrist and licked off his fingers, running his tongue up the seam between them like a reminder. Tom looked away, pulling his wrist from Greg’s grasp.

He wiped his hand on the sheets and turned to sit on the edge of the bed, rubbing his eyes on his knuckles. Greg appeared next to him, leaning forward to try to catch his face for a kiss, but Tom turned away, and Greg pressed a kiss to the side of his neck instead. Tom stood up to dress, grateful he had a separate dressing room and shower from Shiv for the wedding, so she wouldn’t smell the sex on him.

“Tom. You know she’s cheating on you.”

“ _Greg_. How many times to I have to tell you to shut the fuck up about it? You’re way out of fucking line.”

“Just . . . you can still break it off with her, dude.”

“And do what, Gregory? Be with you? Just admit to the whole world I’ve been fucking around on my absurdly hot fiancée with her low-class cousin? Wanna ride off on horseback into the sunset tonight?”

“I think I might be, like, allergic, to horses actually? But—”

“Shut the fuck up, Greg. Jesus.”

Greg stood up and reached for Tom’s shirt, fixed a button he’d missed. Then he caught Tom’s hands, and held tight when he tried to pull away.

“Please.”

Tom looked up into Greg’s face, felt the advance weight of years of regret as an ache in his lower back. He saw himself lying in bed awake and cold, remembering the pleading in Greg’s eyes, his wife curled away from him, or in another room altogether, with someone else. Tom wanted to kiss Greg then, one last time—and there was a reason he’d refused to kiss her at all for so long, wasn’t there?

“Fuck off, Greg,” he said, and this time when he pulled away Greg let go.

“But, just—” Greg said, and Tom spun around and set a hand on Greg’s shoulder to hold him away. He felt a ridiculous cackle rising up in his chest, that he was standing here arguing with a naked person slathered in drying cum, hours before his rehearsal dinner.

“Out of bounds, Greg. We had our arrangement. You agreed to the rules. Hold up your end of the deal. Alright? Fuck off about it.”

“But Tom, just think about—”

“Stop,” Tom said. “You agreed, Greg. When this ends—and it’s ending now, yeah? When this ends, we forget it about it, and pretend it never happened, and we never talk about it again. Okay? It’s done. Don’t bring it up again. Don’t ask me about it ever again.”

He looked back at Greg; it was awful, how easy it was to forget that Greg was standing there naked, how comfortable Tom had gotten with that intimacy. Tom gritted his teeth and ran his hand down the placket of his shirt to check the buttons. “You can’t fucking do this to me again.”

He pulled on his coat, feeling his shirt rumpling underneath it in his haste, and stalked toward the door. He was going to cry, it was going to happen any minute, and he had to get out of there, back to his room, to compose himself. He had a dinner to prepare for. He had a wedding to prepare for. Doubt had no place in all that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _a content note._ I’m using pederasty (in the classical sense, not in the modern sense of euphemism for pedophilia) as a structural frame; Tom and Greg have a modern sort of fuck-buddy agreement explicitly based on pederasty, so pedophilia is briefly mentioned/discussed, but as tagged, their ages are canonically adult.
> 
> I also wanted to take Greg’s canonical petulance and femininity and make them aspects of gender expression, rather than more general personality characteristics, so Greg is at times narrated as "childlike," including in sexual contexts.
> 
> I think this will all be perfectly clear in the fic itself, but I just wanted to be upfront about the content here in case this is squicky for anyone.


	2. the negotiation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Greg makes a proposal.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” —C.S. Lewis

## before.

Greg answered the door wrapped in a ratty bathrobe and a miasma of dank. He leaned forward as if to hug Tom but Tom pushed past him into his trashy little apartment.

“You could at least have gotten dressed, Greg. Jesus.”

“Sorry? I didn’t think about it, I guess. I wasn’t planning on company.”

“I texted you at least an hour ago.”

“Sure, but I’ve been high for, like, I don’t know. A while. Longer than that. So.”

“Sure as shit smells that way.” Tom tucked a six-pack of beer into Greg’s otherwise empty fridge, took one out for himself. He held it out to Greg, like he’d got it out for him.

Greg shook his head, wrinkled his nose. “Gross.”

“ _Gross_ ,” Tom mocked. “What are you, twelve?”

Greg just shrugged and flopped onto his threadbare couch in the quote-unquote living room, mere feet away from where Tom stood in the galley kitchen. He patted the seat next to him, looking back over his shoulder at Tom.

“You can sit,” Greg said.

Tom eyed the couch, wondering how Greg had afforded it, when he’d only just started getting paid and seemed to be spending most of his paychecks on weed and video game consoles. “I’ll stand for now, thanks.”

“Dude. You’re making me nervous, though, hovering like that? Come on.”

“Pardon me if I’m a little suspicious of the provenance of your furniture, Gregory.”

“Well, it’s this or the floor? And I’m just saying, I’d probably trust the carpet less, if I were you.”

Tom perched on the edge of a cushion, as far from Greg as he could get. The sofa was really more of a loveseat, maybe two and a half seats on a normal couch, and Greg had splayed his legs wider than his fair half.

Tom tried the cap on his beer and blushed when it wouldn’t twist off, even if Greg was too entranced by his tiny flatscreen to notice.

“I’m guessing you don’t have a bottle opener.”

After a moment of quiet, Greg held out his hand, said, “Here,” and slowly turned his head to look at Tom. His eyes were round and innocent, especially like this, blasted wide from the weed.

Tom handed him the bottle, watched as Greg drifted to the kitchen and slammed the cap off on the edge of the counter.

“I feel like I’m at a fucking frat house right now,” Tom said.

“Really? Never been in one. So maybe this is more like a rat house. Or a drat house, since you’re in it now.”

“You have rats? _Greg_. No. No. You absolutely cannot—”

“No, just, like— _I’m_ kind of a rat I guess? In this, my dark cave of precious items? And you’re from Michigan or whatever—”

“Minnesota.”

“I said ‘or whatever’? But so you probably say ‘drat,’ like, unironically. I guess I’ve never heard you say that per se, but it sounds like you.”

Tom sipped his beer instead of answering, and Greg lit a joint. On the first fat exhale he asked, “Oh, like, do you mind?”

“No, Gregory, by all means,” Tom said, rolling his eyes. “Little bold to toke up right in front of your boss, no?”

“Hmm. Maybe.” He leaned back into a slouch, knees bent in front of him. Tom watched ash fall to the carpet, watched Greg’s head loll sideways toward him, watched Greg’s eyes blink slow.

“But you wouldn’t fire me, like not actually? Would you?” Greg asked.

“You have no idea, Greg, how much I’d love to use your skull as a corporate bowling ball.”

Greg stared at him, gaze drifting lazy over his face and his shirt and his hands. “I just don’t think that you would.”

“Keep telling yourself that, buddy.”

Greg rolled his face forward and stretched his legs out, crossed his ankles. The tie on his robe had loosened, and in his shifting it had fallen open to reveal a knee, a sliver of thigh. Tom looked at the television.

Greg turned to him abruptly after ages of silence. “What is this about, again? Did you need me to, like, do a thing?”

“No, Greg. Christ, you make it sound like I bait-and-switch you into running shitty errands all day.”

“I mean—”

“Shut up, Greg. This isn’t some kind of task-assignment bribe. No, it’s just—you know, a little celebration, for being done with the Cruises shit. All cleaned up, yeah? And cheers to that.”

Greg tilted his head, as if he couldn’t remember what Cruises shit Tom was talking about. And then his eyebrows lifted, his eyes brightened, and he held up an awkward fist to toast against Tom’s beer.

At some point Greg got up for a glass of water, drawn straight from the tap and chugged down standing over the sink. He still didn’t bother to retie his robe, and Tom still tried not to notice.

“Have you heard of pederasty?” Greg asked, his palate freshened by the water. He sat back down on his two-thirds of couch.

Tom sneered. “I have an MBA, Greg. Of course I’ve heard of pederasty. I’m not some rube.”

“I feel like you should be my pederast. In the Hellenistic sense? Like, for the sake of company cohesion or whatever?”

Tom hid his uncertainty behind a dramatic gasp. “ _Greg_. How deviant.”

“I mean, not really. The Greeks considered it, like, an integral cohesive force in the culture? To establish, like, loyalty bonds and so forth between generations and the masculine folks of society?”

“And this has to do with us—with _you_ —how? You’re not some little boy, Greg,” Tom said. “You’re not some—some gangly teenager,” he said, noticing Greg’s bare bony knees, the coarse hair that ran up the lank of his legs to exposed mid-thigh. Greg slouched somehow even further, his neck craned forward at nearly a right angle and matched by the right angles of his spread knees. The sides of the robe caught under his elbows as he shifted, and it pulled open, clavicle down, revealing a smooth-shaven sternum, soft stubble beneath the belly button, and a pair of dinosaur-print briefs cut across his hip flexors.

Tom frowned, shifted back in his seat and leaned forward at once. “What the fuck are you wearing? How did you even find those in your size?”

“The internet’s a wonderful place, Tom.” Greg smiled over at him lazy. “Do you like them?”

“Do I _like_ them?” Tom tutted. “This is highly uncouth, Greg, even for you.”

“Huh. Sorry? It’s this weed, dude. Like the minute I get high I start getting horny.” He pulled half the robe back over his lap, hiding the heaviness in his briefs.

“I don’t need to know about all that, Greg, yeah? But whatever happened to whiskey dick? No analog? No ‘pot cock’?”

“I mean, kind of? You can still get it up but it’s effectively impossible, like, to come, or whatever? Or I can’t. Can you?” He shifted and leaned and put his head in Tom’s lap. Tom held his hands up so as not to touch him.

“Is this uncouth?” Greg asked, looking up at him.

“It is but that doesn’t seem to be stopping you.”

Greg smirked and rolled to his side, nuzzled his face against Tom’s sweater. His shoulder dug into Tom’s thigh. “You’re not—I mean, you’re not stopping me either,” Greg said. Tom swallowed, set one hand carefully on the armrest and stretched the other arm along the back of the couch. He slid his gaze from Greg’s slender waist, the jut of his hipbone, those primary-color dinosaurs, the sliver of smooth skin at the top of his thigh, and back to the television.

Greg’s hand spidered up Tom’s belly and ribs to his chest and thumbed his nipple through his sweater.

“Your tits are, like, very aesthetic? In this sweater.”

Tom batted his hand away. “My— _Greg_. What the fuck kind of elaborate prank are you trying to pull over on me right now?”

Greg pouted up at him. “Like, I’m not? You get to touch me all the time, so—”

“First of all, no, I don’t. And second of all, that’s different, buddy. _That_ is not _this_. Whatever the fuck is happening here. Not equivalent.”

Greg rolled again, to his back, and rested his skull in his hand, his elbow poking Tom’s stomach. “I know you think I’m, like, super blazed right now, dude, and you wouldn’t be, like, not incorrect? But you probably also think I’ve forgotten about our earlier conversation, and I just want you to know that I definitely, definitively haven’t.”

“I don’t know how this is possible, but you’re making even less sense than you normally do. And given that ‘normal’ for you is ‘Valley Girl with half a GED and a thesaurus,’ that’s saying a lot.” Tom looked at the television, and not at the way Greg’s threadbare robe had gotten caught up underneath him, and definitely not at whatever position he’d twisted his legs into.

“Dude, I think you’re just not, like, listening to me? You know? Like, could you just listen?”

Tom closed his eyes and sighed. “Fine. All ears, Greg. Enlighten me with your stoner adages.”

Greg reached his free arm up to clasp Tom’s shoulder, the twist giving his abdomen the slightest hint of muscle.

“Pederasty,” he said.

Tom rolled his eyes. “Greg. Take a hint, buddy.”

“Remember how you said you would take care of me? ‘Come and see me,’ you said. ‘Let’s find a place for the, um, the Talented Mr. Greg,’ you said. ‘I’ll, like, show you how to be rich,’ you said. Remember?” Greg shook Tom’s shoulder dramatically with each quote, and Tom could feel Greg’s back straightening out in a reclined mockery of Tom’s own usual posture.

“So what if I did?”

“ _So_ , what if, like—next steps? You’re at, you know, the end of the family get-fucked train, right? Uncle Logan fucks my cousins, they fuck you. In the metaphorical sense. That’s how it works. So next steps? You fuck me, in like the Hellenistic pederastic sense, and you feel better because you’re not the fucking caboose anymore, and I feel better because I’m basically indispensable now, at least to somebody, like theoretically speaking. I mean, right?”

“I’m not the family caboose, Greg. Don’t be absurd.”

“Dude, you totally are, though.”

“Fuck off.”

“You know it’s true. Listen,” Greg said, and sat up, crossed his legs up on the couch, and looked Tom straight in the face. “Listen. The thing about pederasty, in like the classical tradition? _Feared by tyrants_. Like, as a practice. Feared by tyrants.”

“Yeah, Greg. No shit. You think if Logan finds out his future son-in-law is fucking his daughter’s cousin he’s going to react _well_?” Tom shook his head and looked up at the television, away from Greg’s face.

“Dude, not like that, though. Like. Listen. It’s about the bond? Like, the homosocial bond? The pederastic connection was thought to be capable of taking down the tyrant. Because, like, think about it, less in-fighting, you know? We could take down the top guy. We could _be_ the top guy.”

Tom didn’t respond, and Greg kept on.

“Come on, Tom. Don’t you wanna be the big guy? The head, fuckin’, enchilada, or whatever? What if, you know, you got to get the girl—the girl being Shiv, not me, but like also me, in this arrangement—and you got to take down your evil father-in-law, in, like, an abstract way, and then . . .”

“And then what, Greg? What happens after that?” Greg stared at him, wide eyed. “Nothing happens after that, man. Because it’s absurd. There’s nowhere to go after that, it’d all be all . . . fucky.”

“Okay, but what about—think about it, dude. Like, you get fucked, in a bad way. All the time. And now you could be the one doing the fucking, in a good way? And I already get fucked in a bad way, too, and I know you probably don’t care about what’s in this for me, but, like, it gets a little exhausting, being the actual caboose that doesn’t get any credit, and I’m just saying it’d be nice for me to get fucked in a good way sometime too, you know?”

“Jesus fucking Christ, Greg. You’re never going to shut up about this, are you? So, fine. Whatever. I’ll do it. But if we’re doing this, we’re doing it right. This isn’t some fuck-buddy shit or whatever you people call it now.”

“Dude, hell yeah. We’re gonna like, tear it up, man.” And then Greg just sat there, smiling at him, legs tangled up next to him on the dingy couch, and Tom looked at his mouth and his soft, open face and stood abruptly.

“Okay, Greg. Well, as delightfully squalid as this evening has been, I do have a fiancée and a dog waiting up for me, so pardon me if I move along.” Tom brushed couch lint and prole dust off his pants and his sweater, where Greg had been groping him with smoke-stained hands. “We’ll circle back later about, ah, arrangements.”

Tom let himself out and dissociated the entire ride back to his empty apartment, failing to recall what had been playing on Greg’s television, though he’d been trying to watch the whole time.

* * *

Even though he’d cleared up the Cruises evidence, thanks in small part to Greg, Tom couldn’t shake the fear that something else was going to fall through. It didn’t help that the division was still doing so poorly—Bill had been a friendly old coot but an awful businessman. Tom didn’t know if he was doing all that much better, but then again he’d just started a few months ago, so who could blame him for not having fixed everything right up just yet? (The answer was Logan—Logan could blame him, and did. And since Kendall’s takeover bid had just fallen through, Logan was laying out heavy on any perceived disloyalty, which included any kind of failure.)

So there was the stress of being at the head of a poorly performing division that his future father-in-law relied on to be a steady moneymaker, not to mention the stress of planning the wedding, basically alone, since Shiv seemed to want nothing to do with the details, and definitely not to mention his agreement with Greg, since in addition to orchestrating his wedding planning, he was apparently supposed to be planning some kind of outing for him and Greg to initiate Greg’s absolutely deranged idea of optimizing their business relationship.

He’d read up on pederasty more after his talk with Greg—he’d known at the time he was wading into some shit, but he _hadn’t_ known at the time quite how deep it was. But like he told Greg, he wanted to do it the right way. They weren’t just going to be fucking around. Who wanted to fuck around with Greg anyway? Fucking your foxy boss to get a half-step up the corporate ladder? Sure. But fucking your gangly assistant slash fiancée’s cousin? What would that get Tom?

No, going along with the agreement wasn’t so much in Tom’s interest as it was in Greg’s, but Greg’s points about pederastic practice being feared by tyrants, as ridiculous and antiquated as they sounded, had also been persuasive. Tom was feeling not at all secure in his positions both on the payroll and in the family, and there were positives about this arrangement that were just too good to pass up: he'd have an extra ally, a back-alley in, and reassurance that Greg, his primary departmental rival, would stay on his side.

So Tom was going to do the three bullshit gifts, the advance-notice abduction, the whole Zeus-Abducts-Ganymede shebang. He’d set the boundaries, and it would be awkward, maybe, but also maybe an extra outlet for all the sex he _wasn’t_ having with Shiv, despite their recent engagement. But in any case it was just an idea, a professional expansion of a working relationship, and if it didn’t work out then he and Greg would go back to their more modern traditional working relationship and nobody would ever know the difference.

The stress of all of it was definitely getting to him, though. He slept alone half the time, with Shiv gone on campaign trips with Joyce, and he woke up at odd hours convinced he’d overslept, only to realize it wasn’t even dawn. And he dreamed dreams that felt strange and prophetic, and woke up in a sheen of uneasy sweat, overheated.

In one dream, he slouched on Greg’s dingy sofa, feet propped up on the coffee table, and Greg curled up next to him, head held up on one fist, smiling stupid up at Tom, eyes round and sweet. And then Greg leaned forward, and pressed his nose into the hair on Tom’s chest, and slid his face slow over to lave at one of his nipples, suckling at it while Tom stroked his hair, watching him.

Tom woke up confused and pissed off and nauseous, and with shame threading his gut he jerked himself off, pinching his nipple hard to make himself come. He just wanted to get back to sleep.

At work he tried not to think about the dreams, about any of it. But of course Greg was unavoidable, an obsequious barnacle—drifting by conference room windows with coffee cups dwarfed in his hand, whining about the infrequency of snack replenishment in the breakroom, his sad eyes pleading with Tom to let him add an extra muffin to the coffee shop order.

He thought about what he could teach Greg. The business stuff would come around during work hours, but none of that would matter if Greg stayed like—Greg. The guy had no class. He scarfed down whatever food was available, no taste. He drank the cheapest thing on the menu, beer or some well liquor mixed with soda.

And none of his clothes fit. His bony wrists protruded from his sleeves, his shirts mushroomed around his skinny waist, his pants flopped too short, cut too wide around his slender ankles. It was almost like the clothes were rejecting him, shoes coming untied and shirt coming untucked and sleeves riding up, saying, _No, no, this is all wrong, buddy_. Greg wasn’t sexy, not in his business attire.

But Tom had seen those legs slim and spare underneath Greg’s ratty robe, and he was painfully aware that he could be sexy, when he was comfortable, his limbs loose in his own clothes, or in almost nothing—and that was without even trying, and perhaps completely in spite of Tom’s ideals of what sexy even meant. What gave Greg the right to be so comfortable next to naked, when he looked so swamped and near-destitute and awkward in the business attire that was supposed to make a man _a man_? Attractive and wealthy and well heeled?

There had to be some clothing out there that would suit him. Tom started where he’d start for himself—he bought Greg a suit he liked, picked out a shirt and tie and all the accoutrements to match, and sent Greg to his tailor one afternoon to have his measurements done and the suit hemmed and taken in to accommodate Greg’s sartorially resistant body.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The "three bullshit gifts [and] the advance-notice abduction" Tom mentions are based on [Cretan pederastic custom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pederasty_in_ancient_Greece#Origins): military attire, an ox for sacrificing, and a very special drinking cup


	3. the suit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> First times.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “There’s nothing like a song that says I FEEL LOVE over and over to make you feel lonely.” —Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, _The Freezer Door_

“Here’s where we’re meeting, Greg.” Tom slid a note across the table to Greg with the details for their upcoming weekend training, a cover for their first liaison under their fledgling arrangement. They were at a coffee shop a few blocks from the office, not their usual one—Tom had wanted to meet somewhere neutral, somewhere open, but where they wouldn’t be readily recognized.

“Oh. Um, for? Like, meeting for what exactly?”

“The training, Greg? The _weekend training_ we scheduled weeks ago?”

“Oh, fuck. Right, sorry. So do I need to bring . . . anything, uh, in specific? Particular, um, corporate supplies?”

“Wear your suit Friday. The new one? We’ll go straight there from work, yeah? And—I don’t know, Greg, whatever you’d bring for a normal weekend trip, just with your work clothes instead of whatever thrift-store garbage you wear on your own time. Do I need to write up a fucking packing list? Am I sending my little boy off to his first sleepaway camp?”

“No, like—I got it, dude.”

“Well, great. Let’s lay out some ground rules, yeah?”

“Like . . . here, though, Tom?”

“Yes, here, Greg. Nobody gives a fuck what we’re talking about, man. We’re just a couple more big-headed corporate fuckers, yeah? Everybody’s off in their own world daydreaming about their weekend swinger parties.”

“I don’t think those are a thing anymore, but—”

“Whatever. The point is: rules. We need them. We can’t just go floundering around willy-nilly in an industrial kitchen with our willies out and expect nothing to get chopped off.”

“No, sure. Good idea. Good, uh, planning ahead.”

Tom leaned in a little, checking one last time that nobody had sat at the tables nearest them. He looked back at Greg. “Okay. Rule 1: no fucking. I’m already engaged. I don’t need to get my dick wet anywhere else, and I don’t want to go blurring any boundaries. Got it?”

“Sure, that sounds—”

Tom waved his hand. “I don’t need your permission, Greg. These are my rules. I’m just laying them out for you.”

“Got it.”

“Alright. Rule 2: you’re passive. This is based on the traditional, classical setup, whatever you want to call it. I’m just saying there’s precedent. You do what I tell you, I get my rocks off, I teach you the ways of the businessman, that’s it. Yeah?”

Greg pursed his lips, silent, and nodded.

“Rule 3: just to be clear, this is a trial of an extension of our working, professional relationship,” Tom said, enunciating the big, important words as clearly as he could. “Okay, Greg? A _trial_ of an _extension_. This is not a separate _thing_. Not a capital-T _Thing_ at all. If shit gets skidgy, we cut it and go back to how everything was before and we forget about all of this and never speak of it again. Okay?”

“Mmhmm.”

“Can you do that?”

“Yep.”

“Any complaints?”

“Are you—are you actually asking now, or?”

“Yes, Greg. I need you to agree, guy. Consent?”

“Um, then no. No complaints. But I’m just wondering if this could be, maybe, like, an open dialogue? Like, say, if I were to have some kind of minor complaint at some future point in time? Then, at that point, could I, you know—”

“Sure, Greg. Open dialogue. Call it whenever you want. Employment at will, termination at will, blah blah. Yeah? We good?”

“Um. Yeah. All good.”

“Don’t be nervous, Greg. Yeah? I’ll take care of you.”

“Right. Yeah, I—I know.”

* * *

Friday morning, Shiv stopped to kiss Tom’s forehead on her way out to work.

“Oh. I’ll be out of town for a couple days. Got a . . . thing with Joyce. Campaign thing.” She backed away from the table. “I won’t bore you with the details. Anyway, see you Sunday night, yeah?”

“Yeah, sure. I’ll, ah, be with Greg anyway. Got a training thing, you know? Corporate stuff. So I won’t be lonely. Don’t you fret, honey.” Tom hoped his smile didn’t look too stiff, but Shiv was only glancing at him as she gathered her things anyway.

“Oh,” she laughed. “Yeah, no worries. Okay, honey. Sunday. Love you.”

“Love you,” Tom said, standing up in a hurry to shut the door behind her, plant one last cheeky kiss on her rosy face.

* * *

“You look like a child playing dress-up,” Tom said. They were in Tom’s room at the hotel for their training weekend, Tom sitting in an armchair with a glass of wine, Greg standing in front of him in his new suit. He’d worn it to work, as Tom had requested, but Tom hadn’t had a chance until now to give him a good look.

“Yeah, that’s how—like, I feel like that pretty much most of the time.”

“Why can’t you just look like a normal man in normal business attire, Greg? We had that suit fucking tailored.” Somehow it still hung off him, the slacks too loose and slightly too short, the dress shirt inexplicably too wide, billowing out above the waist of the slacks and bulky under the jacket. Maybe Tom needed a new tailor—he never had trouble himself, but then he was average in almost every way, physically, if on the tall side. Were there tailors who specialized in beanpoles?

Greg just shrugged, and Tom scoffed. “Whatever,” Tom said. “Take it off.”

“What?”

“Take it off. Show me how you store it. This is training, Greg. I’m not going to invest in a proper suit for you if you’re just going to pile it up in a grimy chair to wrinkle every day after work.” Tom gestured with his glass. “Jacket first.”

Greg took off the jacket and stood there clutching it to his chest, peering around the room nervously. When he spotted the closet he got out a hanger and hung up the jacket, glancing up at Tom while he adjusted the shoulders and fastened one of the buttons.

“Is that good?” Greg asked, brushing off the front.

“Fine. Pants.”

Greg hung up the jacket in the closet and hesitantly reached for the button on his pants.

“Oh, come on, Greg. I’ve seen you in your little panties before.”

“Yeah, but—” Greg hesitated and tossed his head, shaking his hair out of his face. “But I was, like, high last time, dude.”

“Well, unless you brought your pot stash with you, Gregory, you’re going to have to make do without this time.”

Greg shook his head, eyes widening briefly, and took a sip of his drink from the desk. Then he took off his pants quick and easy, strode back across the room in shirt (white) and briefs (green) and socks (black) and got out another hanger. Tom raised an eyebrow, watching him choose, and Greg paused.

“What? I don’t, like, fold them.”

Tom stood up and took out a hanger with clips. “Then don’t fold them across the hanger, either,” he said. “Shake them out by the hem. No, Greg, the hem—the bottom? The part you stick your fucking flippers through? Jesus.”

Greg obeyed, flustered, and Tom stood a beat too close, fidgeting with the wrong hanger.

“Match the creases. Mmhmm. And clip them there,” he said, nodding once. Greg took a step sideways to set the hanger in the closet, and Tom stood just where he was, side-eyeing Greg while he sipped his wine.

“Shirt,” Tom said, and Greg squared his shoulders and looked right at Tom while he unbuttoned it. He stood there in his briefs and socks and balled up the shirt and tossed it onto a chair.

Tom stared hard at his face, didn’t look at his chest to see if it was still shaved. “You’re not going to hang it up?” he asked.

“No, because I’m loaded, right? I’ll wash it—or, like, have it cleaned, rather.”

Tom grinned. “Look at you, buddy. Knowing your part.” Greg’s shoulders sloped a little then, and he looked down, tucked his hair behind his ear, his smile so fucking demure Tom wanted to punch him, maybe on the shoulder, or maybe just straight on his sweet fucking face.

Tom sat down with his glass in the armchair a few paces in front of Greg, leaned back and let himself look: Greg’s chest was still shaved, and his armpits too, maybe—or it had looked like it when he’d raised his hand to his face. Tom wondered why, but Greg was a peculiar guy in other ways. Maybe it was a Canadian thing. Or maybe it was just a Greg thing.

And then there were the briefs—green today, with white trim. Why? His legs were already as long as Tom was tall, basically, and that cut above the tops of his slim thighs made his legs look even longer. What a strange preference—Tom had never wanted anything cut that close, or across his ass like that, in thick seams that showed through his slacks. But Greg’s ass was so spare that maybe that wasn’t an issue for him.

Greg’s hands twitched at his sides, as if he were trying to stand at attention for an inspection and wanted desperately to cover himself. But he didn’t seem that embarrassed by the attention, if the heaviness of his dick was any indication. Tom looked back up at his face, and Greg flushed, his mouth twitched, his bony chest moving over shallow breaths.

“Do you like being watched?” Tom asked. “Or do you just like being paid attention to?”

Greg shifted, tilted his head like he wasn’t sure if he was supposed to answer or not. And Tom _liked_ that implication of obedience.

“Everyone is watching you, Cousin Greg,” Tom said in the voice he reserved for mocking Greg. He didn’t linger on the fact that he already had a voice in his repertoire that suited this situation so perfectly. Greg shifted, still quiet.

Tom went on: “Everyone is paying attention to you, Greg. How do you like it? Everyone’s noticing your posture, and your shaved chest, and your shaved armpits, and your quirky choice of underclothes, and we’re all just sitting here wondering why you are the way that you are. Do you feel sexy this way, is that it?” Tom leaned forward, waiting for a response.

“I wouldn’t—I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t, I guess?”

Tom laughed. “Touch your tits. Do you feel sexy like that?” He said it like he was still mocking, but he didn’t lean back, didn’t think fast enough to pretend disaffection while Greg obeyed. “God, I feel like we should be frolicking in a pollinated Athenian meadow right now.”

Why was it that he felt so enraptured by Greg’s femininity in this, when he thought he’d meant the order as a punishment? _Touch yourself like a woman. Emasculate yourself in front of me._ But instead of being emasculated by it, humiliated, Greg embodied the movement in this almost absurd way that made Tom’s gut ache.

Tom took a sip of wine and said, “Strip,” and Greg turned to the side like a fucking pinup girl, sliding his underwear down over a knee bent to hide his dick, his utilitarian ass up and out.

Tom swallowed; the alcohol was making him salivate. “Spread your ass.” Greg chewed his lip and turned toward the uncovered floor-to-ceiling window and bent forward just enough to arch his back and grasp his ass and spread it open for Tom to see. And Tom’s whole body throbbed then, at the sight of Greg’s ass open and available like that and his dick hanging heavy between his thighs.

Tom stood up, and the sounds of his glass on the side table and his belt and his fly were loud in the silence. Greg stayed just where he was as Tom came over to him, slicking his cock with lube, but Greg flinched just slightly when Tom dripped more between his ass cheeks, careful not to let his hands touch.

“Legs together, cocksock,” Tom said, and Greg obeyed. “Hands on the window,” Tom said.

Greg touched the window and flinched back, looking at Tom through the reflection on the glass. “It’s cold,” he said.

“Greg.”

Greg groaned, petulant, but did it anyway. Tom looked at his spine, the spare muscle on his shoulders, conscious now that Greg could see his face, if only in blurred reflection. Tom rucked up his shirt and stroked his cock again and swallowed, anxiety suddenly making his chest tight. Greg gasped quietly and leaned forward when Tom slid his cock between his thighs, just under his ass. He thrust a few times at an easy pace, balancing with a hand on Greg’s hipbone. But he didn’t want to get too close, didn’t want to touch any more than he had to, so he didn’t set his hips flush against Greg’s ass, and it felt awkward, forced, not enough.

“Looser than a used cunt,” Tom said, and Greg breathed out an apology. Tom pulled back, and gripped Greg’s ass in one hand, slid the head of his cock up with the other, up and over his asshole, and it was so hot, and Tom hesitated. If he could just—

But then Greg whimpered, arched his back, taking him inside just the slightest bit, and Tom blinked. There were rules.

Instead he yanked Greg’s hips back and kicked the back of one of his knees with a toe to force him down a little, and thrust his dick up between Greg’s ass cheeks. He held that hip and leaned back a little to give himself space and jerked himself off, with Greg grinding back against him, his forearms braced against the window, looking out over the skyline, that tower with neither of their names on it in the distance.

Tom turned away abruptly to come into his shirt, and started toward the bathroom, stripping his shirt off, before Greg even straightened up. Tom looked back briefly and saw him still standing there back arched, one calf shaking, like he was hoping Tom wasn’t done.

“Lube’s by your feet,” Tom said. He shut the bathroom door and stood behind it, clutching his shirt, until he heard steps toward the bed, then the slick whispers of Greg finishing himself off. Tom showered, trying not to think about how Greg had finished—whether he’d lain down and fingered himself, whether he’d sat just on the bed in his hurry, whether he’d crouched on all fours and arched his back, begging to be fucked—because it didn’t matter, Tom didn’t care. Greg’s orgasm or enjoyment was irrelevant.

Tom walked back out with a towel around his waist and found Greg laid back across the bed, a shirt crumpled on the floor beside him. The room smelled of cum and sweat, familiar and not. Greg sat up slow, looking half-asleep, and gazed wide-eyed at Tom’s bare chest, his shoulders.

“I didn’t know you were so . . . befreckled,” Greg said.

Tom glared. “Why are you still in my room, Gregory?”

“Well, I didn’t want to, like, just hit and run, you know? So—”

“Fine, you’ve done your duty. Pitter fucking patter, buddy.”

“Okay, but—I thought, maybe, would you want, like, a drink? Or something?”

And a drink sounded nice, yes, but not right then, not with Greg there: Greg his assistant, Greg Shiv’s cousin, Greg who he’d just half-fucked, who had just heard whatever sounds Tom’s own ears mercifully muted when he orgasmed, who was sitting there still naked and staring up at Tom, standing in front of him half-bare himself.

“Oh, sweet Gregory. What a grand and intoxicating innocence. You can have a drink on your own time, buddy. You have your very own Cousin Greg minibar in your very own Cousin Greg room, yeah? Come on. Move along.” Tom shooed his hands, and Greg gathered up his clothes from the chair and the floor and the closet and disappeared quiet through the door between their rooms, a midnight mistress.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [what a grand and intoxicating innocence](https://van1lla-v1lla1n.tumblr.com/post/643660275965444096/woke-up-thinking-about-the-absolute-tomgreg-vibe)


	4. the ox

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Greg has a business question and a coming-out to do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "When you are not with me I want you to remember who you are and I want you to remember who your girl is and so I offer myself to your hungry mouth now. I give you all the words to all of the stories of my body and I read all the stories of yours." —Fran Varian, in _Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation_

Tom never could quite keep track of the Roy family escalations, and he wasn’t quite sure how they’d gotten here. Kendall showing up at Austerlitz first of all unexpected and second of all freshly off the wagon certainly hadn’t helped, nor had the therapist’s injury (or his presence at all, more honestly), nor had Shiv ditching for most of the day and reappearing only when tensions had already risen.

But, somehow, here they were, Logan upset at all of them, each of them, and none of them but Kendall rising to shield anyone else.

“I keep an eye on things, Siobhan. I keep an eye,” Logan said, raising an eyebrow at her pointedly.

“I had a meeting,” she said, and even Tom thought he could hear a lie there, something underneath. Still he stood behind her, a hand supportive on her shoulder, belying how unsupportive he felt in nearly siding with her father’s suspicion.

“You run toward politics to prove that you’re your own man,” Logan said. “Fine. But that’s not principle. You’re scared to compete. You’re marrying a man fathoms beneath you because you don’t want to risk being betrayed. You’re a fucking coward.”

Shiv said something in response to all that, but whatever it was, Tom was so shocked that he didn’t hear it. He knew Logan didn’t particularly like him, but he figured most of it was just the typical father-in-law animosity—the _you’re taking my only daughter and it’s not that I want to fuck her but I’m not sure I want you to either_ kind of animosity. But apparently it was a bit more than that. When Shiv turned to leave, Tom shadowed her back to their room, hearing Logan lay into Kendall next behind them.

Tom sat next to her when she sat on edge of the bed, silent. He wanted to apologize for what Logan had said, wanted to apologize that Logan had been right to say it. But he wasn’t sure if Shiv believed that, and he didn’t want to put the thought in her head any more solidly than Logan had. So he kept his mouth shut and let her sulk.

He wouldn’t have complained if she wanted to apologize to him, though, for letting her father speak about him that way, for letting her family think she believed it. Had she been offended that Logan had undermined her agency, her independence, as if all her choices were made only counter to his wishes? Or had she been upset on Tom’s behalf, that Logan had insulted him so thoroughly with Tom standing right there?

She stared straight ahead, seething too steadily to even acknowledge he was there. Her lips looked swollen, like they used to when she would let Tom kiss her for hours. Maybe it was just that she was trying not to cry, her face reddening with the sting. But he wondered where she’d been that day—at an interview, yes, but. But.

Did it make him like her father, that he too was suspicious of where she’d been? _I had a meeting_ , she’d said. Tom had known that. But.

He let it cut into him a little deeper, that image of her making out with someone else, or maybe of her acid mouth on some better, elegantly curved cock, and he let the dull edge of his hypocritical jealousy tear him ragged. His arrangement with Greg was different, he insisted to himself—that wasn’t cheating, just an expansion of a working relationship. He didn’t know if Shiv would see it that way, though. He wasn’t even really sure he saw it that way himself.

* * *

Greg came into Tom’s office late one afternoon, and stood there hemming and hawing and staring at Tom’s framed diplomas, avoiding looking at Tom entirely. He’d gotten another suit, darker, with trousers trim against his slender legs and a shirt with a slimmer cut that made Tom's jaw ache.

“Yes?” Tom said. “Can I help you, Greg? My young padawan?”

“Oh. I think I had, like, a business question?”

“Okay,” Tom said. Greg opened his mouth to speak but still said nothing. Tom prompted him: “Well?”

“Well, I just thought that maybe, you know, we could schedule a time to talk about it? A meeting, perhaps? Like, I just don’t feel quite, you know, prepared, right now, so . . .”

“Ah. Well, Gregory, you’re in luck, because it turns out the boss’s old ball and chain is on a business trip this very Friday. Why don’t we make an evening of it—talk like businessmen, over a steak?”

* * *

“Open,” Tom said, and slid a bite of steak into Greg’s mouth when he obeyed, set the fork back down on the plate. Greg was straddling his lap in navy briefs and argyle socks, legs folded around Tom’s hips, shoulders curved forward. Tom gave him another bite, forgoing the fork this time, and chose to believe it was an accident when Greg’s tongue darted over his fingertips.

Between his own bites and Greg’s, Tom explained what to order at a fine restaurant, how to know if a cut was good, and so on. Greg nodded along, but Tom saw how his eyes followed his fingers to the plate and lingered on his mouth when he talked. Tom ate slow, and not much: he’d never minded much eating in front of people, but trying to chew and talk while Greg’s watchful eyes were inches from his face was rather more difficult than an ordinary dinner.

When they finished, Tom searched for something else to say, some closing lesson to impart, but he lost the thread when Greg took hold of Tom's wrist and held the fingers against his mouth. He licked the fingertips, watching Tom’s face, and when Tom didn’t push him away Greg opened his mouth and slid Tom’s first two fingers inside, tracing his tongue up the seam between them. He sucked as he pulled them out, eyes wide as if he worried Tom would slap him the second he let go.

Tom wiped his hand on a napkin instead, thinking of the women he’d seen do that in porn, begging dramatically to be fingered, trying to look innocent. But Greg’s innocence never looked feigned—Greg with his ideals and his dewy doe eyes and his soft, open face. And of course Tom thought about fingering him, slipping himself into Greg elsewhere hot and tight.

Greg stared into his face and reached down to cup Tom’s half-hard dick through his pants, and really Tom hadn’t wanted to be touched—this was supposed to be about him taking what he wanted from Greg, and giving back whatever he thought Greg needed. Not about Greg trying to guess what Tom might want, not about Greg trying to provide. But Greg’s hand was warm and massive and traced him with just the right amount of pressure, and Tom let it happen.

And then Greg slid both hands up to Tom’s waist, rubbing his ribs and his chest through his shirt; he leaned forward, wrapped his arms around Tom’s neck, slid his hips forward in Tom’s lap, rutting against him. Tom gripped his waist for a moment, jerking his hips up underneath him, face against his chest, and then pushed him off.

“Clothes off,” Tom said, pressing Greg back to stand against a wall with a hand on his chest.

“What about, um—socks?”

“Greg, I could not give fewer fucks about your feet.” Tom watched as Greg stripped his underwear off, more rushed and pragmatic than his little pinup-girl move last time. And then he just stood there, staring at Tom open mouthed, until Tom shoved his shoulder to turn him toward the wall. Tom took his dick out with shaky hands, backtracked briefly for lube, and when he turned back around Greg had set his hands up at shoulder height on the wall, was just standing there, flexing his lower back restlessly.

“Patience, Gregory,” Tom said, smirking and deciding to reward him a little. He poured lube onto his fingers, spread it from Greg’s balls up over his ass, gripping Greg’s hip with his other hand as he arched back against Tom’s touch. Tom stroked himself, nudged Greg’s shin with one foot to close his legs, and slid his cock between Greg’s thighs, dragging the head back over that smooth space where a different Greg’s cunt might have been.

Greg let his head fall forward against the wall, and Tom held his hipbone as he fucked between his legs—feeling it this time as he hadn’t the first, the movement the closest possible approximation to an ideal he was choosing not to want. Greg dropped a hand to touch himself, the other flexing against the wall, elbow bent to define the spare muscle of his shoulder.

Greg choked off half a moan and turned his head sideways to speak in a voice almost unrecognizable: “On my ass, please. The cum?”

Tom clutched Greg’s shoulder, his fingers grazing the base of his throat, and thrust against him faster, surprised by his own reaction to Greg practically begging for his cum. Tom let him have it, though, spilling between the cheeks of his ass, and Greg reached back the moment Tom pulled away to spread his cum forward, slicking it over his own cock. Greg’s back bowed forward as he pressed a fingertip into himself, his face smashed against the wall.

Tom stood there rapt as Greg fumbled down for his underwear and finished himself off into the fabric, his knees bent gumbier than ever. Greg started to straighten up, and Tom turned around hurriedly.

“Gonna have a piss,” Tom said. As much as Tom wanted to ditch the scene as soon as his orgasm wore off, he couldn’t this time. He’d promised Greg a businessmen’s discussion. In front of the mirror in the bathroom, Tom tucked himself into his pants, grimacing at the drying lube on his dick, and straightened his clothes, glad he’d managed to avoid getting lube anywhere else.

Greg brushed through with a shy smile and a new set of clothes when Tom opened the door. Tom sat back down in the armchair he’d been in earlier, with Greg in his lap, and after a moment Greg reappeared from the bathroom in thin sweatpants, slightly too short, and a worn t-shirt that clung to his collarbone, sluicing across his sternum between his little tits.

Greg sat on the edge of the bed, his hands tucked between his knees, and then he straightened his back out, sitting up tall, raising his chin.

“I was wondering if we could talk about, like, you know, my position? Corporate—in the corporate sense?”

“What about your position, Greg?”

“Well, you know, for instance, that I’ve always wanted to move to someplace like, or something roughly equivalent to—um, to Digital?”

“Fat fucking chance, Greg. Fuck Digital. I’m not moving to Digital, so you’re not moving to Digital. We just got our in and steady at Cruises. Finally cleaned up the shit and now we can dig our way up a little bit.”

“Yeah, I know. But, like, maybe we could, you know, adjust my job description? Add a wider range of tasks? A more multimedia kind of bent?”

“I can get you that in Cruises, Greg. We don’t need to go through all this rigmarole.”

“I guess I’m just feeling a little stifled . . . You know? By the atmosphere—the legacy? Like, even if it’s fixed now, all that shit still went down, dude.”

“Oh, leave your principles at the door.” Tom scoffed. “Man the fuck up, Greg.”

“Tom—I hate saying this, I really do? But, like, don’t say that to me, dude. I’m not—”

“Not what, a man? I think that’s fucking clear, Greg, by your comportment.” Tom laughed like it was a joke but it didn't feel like one, even as he said it.

“Yeah, but—but I don’t want to be that. A man. Or whatever.”

Tom glared at him, irritated at his own confusion. “Then what the fuck are you, Greg? What the hell are you talking about?”

“A boy. Your boy. Not like _yours_ yours, but just—”

Tom ignored the second part. “What the fuck is the difference, Greg?”

“Do I look like a fucking adult to you, Tom? I don’t feel like an adult. Physically—like, developmentally, sure. Yeah. But like, to you, as a person—person to person, me to you, who’s the man here? It’s not fucking me, Tom.”

“And what, you’re going to tell me you’re somehow also not a woman if in the first place you’re not a man?”

“Maybe I am, like, when I’m with you? Not a woman, per se, but like, your—your other woman, specifically, maybe.”

“Who the fuck have I been fucking, Greg?”

Greg flopped back on the bed, arms outstretched. “Not me, Tom. Not fuckin’ me.”

Tom rolled his eyes. “You know what I mean, Greg.”

“I do. Yeah,” Greg said, sitting back up and staring at the floor. “But you don’t have to be such a dick about it.”

“I just—I don’t _get_ it, Greg. I don’t fucking get it.” Tom ran a hand through his hair in exasperation and then hurried to smooth it back down. “How am I supposed to relate to you? You make it sound like you want me to be your fucking dad.”

“That’s the whole point, dude. Just relate to me how you already do. I’m not asking you to act different. I’m not asking you to be my fucking dad. I already have a dad. I’m just—I’m trying to explicate, like, my side. I thought you’d want to know, or, like, at least try to fucking understand. But maybe that’s not our fucking deal, right? Am I getting outside my passive remit?” Greg’s voice had taken on that plaintive whine, his hands held out to the sides, defensive.

“Oh, fuck off, Greg. Come on, buddy. We’re pals, yeah? But come on.” Greg shook his head and didn’t respond, and Tom got up and sat next to him on the bed. He patted Greg’s thigh, too forcefully to be interpreted sexually, he hoped. “We’re good, buddy. I don’t fucking get it, but . . . sorry. I’m not saying I don’t believe you. I do. I just don’t know what you want me to do with it.”

“Nothing,” Greg said. “I don’t want you to do anything. Except, like . . . consider the task expansion thing we talked about? Would that—um, you be amenable?”

“Yeah, Greg. I’ll consider it.” The room went quiet, and not sure what else to do to break the silence and close out the evening, Tom offered Greg a drink. It was only courteous after they'd shared dinner, after Greg had asked him such a tough question. He knew it wasn't easy asking for a positional change like that; he'd had to do the same as a young guy in business.

So Greg stayed, and when he finished his drink he went obediently back to his own room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the ox sacrifice is traditionally supposed to be shared with friends but as we've established tom is greg's only friend so ha
> 
> [fic playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6NQkbyhf8Tpv8EkpoKrkrU?si=fc4766b3d74e4d3b) (the title is from "Presumably Dead Arm" by Sidney Gish, therein)


	5. the exception

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tom's bachelor party.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "When you unwittingly stuck your hand in the wasps' nest, you hadn't made a covenant with the devil to give up your civilized self with its trappings of love and respect and honor. It just happened to you. Passively, with no say, you ceased to be a creature of the mind and became a creature of the nerve endings." —Stephen King, _The Shining_
> 
> cw for body discussion, including slenderness/fat distribution.

“Hey, Shiv? Just a reminder? My bachelor party is this weekend, so, just so you know. It’s in town, so I won’t be too far, okay? Just, you know, in case.” They were catching up after work, before Shiv headed out for drinks.

“Oh, yeah. Of course.”

“Did you ever plan anything for yours?”

“For my what?”

“Your bachelorette party. Come on, honey, you have to do something. You can’t just leave it uncelebrated. Last chance, right? Last weeks as an unmarried young woman of the nation’s elite?”

“Oh, I mean. I have a catch-up thing with Gil’s team this weekend. Short trip. We’ll all be out for drinks anyway, I’m sure, so I can just double-count it. But hey, listen,” Shiv said, coming over to straddle his lap, her ass perched on his knees, hands loose on his shoulders. “I want _you_ to have the night of your life, Wambsgans. I’m giving you free reign. Whatever you want. No questions asked. Yeah?”

“Sure, honey, I mean . . . But really? Free reign?” He set his hands on her waist, holding her there to answer his question.

“Free reign,” she said, and kissed his nose before standing up, her back arching under Tom’s hands on the way up. “I want you do something you’ll never ever want to tell me about. Yeah?”

“Never? Like really never? Or are you fucking with me?”

“Tom. I’m not fucking with you. I mean it.” She wrapped an arm around his neck like a headlock and kissed his forehead on her way out the door. “Never ever.”

“But do you think we should, you know, set some kind of boundaries? Or . . . ?” Tom asked, turning around in his chair to face her.

“Nah. We’re adults, yeah?” She shrugged. “We’ll know.”

* * *

Greg showed up for Tom’s bachelor party wearing pleated trousers tailored high at his waist, a button-down shirt, tucked in and cut slender enough not to billow, and Chelsea boots. The shirt was a soft cotton, unstarched, but buttoned up all the way to look stiff even if the material wasn’t.

Tom frowned at him, his nonstandard sartorial choices feeling like some kind of personal affront, a derision at Tom’s own taste. It was like a dismissal, that Greg had found clothes that suited him so well when Tom hadn’t been able to do that himself, not even as the mentor figure.

And Greg was being a fucking downer, sullen, flighty—always looking for _Ken_ , asking where _Ken_ was, when what Tom really wanted was Greg’s attention, a half-jealous wingman. Instead he got stuck with Roman off to the side of one of the higher-traffic rooms at this dingy yet exclusive warehouse party, dim and loud and sexy.

Greg didn’t seem like the type for the real drugs, the _bad ones_ , but the next time Tom spotted him he was on his knees, leaning over a table next to Kendall.

“Go on,” Kendall was saying to Greg, looking a little blasted himself and faintly amused.

“I’m goin’,” Greg said, harried, flustered.

“Ooh, Greg!” Tom said. “Go for it, Greg! Suck on those big white dicks, you fuckin’ pervert.” He was glad Greg was finally getting a little into the spirit, and one drink past caring if anyone interpreted that comment as him having any interest in what Greg put in his mouth in his spare time.

Kendall laughed and slunk off while Greg recovered, eyes wide between slow blinks.

“Greg, you greedy piece of shit,” Tom said, slapping his shoulder.

“Oh my God.” Greg stumbled to stand, looking like he was about to freak the fuck out, and Tom pulled him over to a corner.

“Greg, you total coke whore.”

“Should I puke?” Greg asked, panicked.

“Not unless you can puke up your entire bloodstream,” Tom said, trying to keep the mood light.

Greg started looking around for Kendall, more frantic then, and Tom babysat him for a bit before he got bored. After Greg gave up on Kendall, he’d started staring at the projections on the walls anyway, a horrible conversation partner, and Tom was tired of trying to get a rise out of him. He went back out to look for the blonde who’d made a pass at him earlier, and he got the attention and the bachelor’s blowjob he well deserved.

But Greg was still sullen when Tom found him later and regaled him with the epic story of his blowjob.

“You swallowed your own load?” Greg asked, and Tom could only assume that Greg was jealous. Or surprised he’d gone through with it.

“Yeah,” Tom said. “I heard of it, but I don’t . . . I didn’t know it actually happened.”

“I haven’t heard about it before,” Greg said. And that was difficult to believe, honestly, even if Greg was playacting the eromenos’s ideal modest passivity.

“I have,” Tom said. “It’s a thing. There’s a word for it. I can’t remember what it is right now.”

Greg hummed noncommittally.

“So fuckin’ hot.” Tom smiled to himself, thinking about it, wondering if Greg had wanted it to be him. And he would very well keep it to himself, thank you, if he had imagined that the willowy, poofy-haired woman with her mouth on his dick was someone with larger hands and darker shorter hair and was whining about their knees on the hard ground between licks.

He looked up to see Greg grimacing down at the bar.

“Are you jealous, Gregory?”

“No, I just—”

“What, you want me to spit your cum back into _your_ mouth, Greg? Like a little baby bird? I bet you wouldn’t frown so much then.” Tom leaned in to murmur against Greg’s ear. “You want me to lick my cum out of your ass, Greg? Give you your own sloppy seconds? Huh?”

Greg pulled away, smirking but glancing around paranoid. “When are we allowed to go home?”

“We have cars at five,” Tom said. “Greg, I’m having the time of my life.”

“This is nightmarish.”

“Oh, come on, Greg. Liven up, buddy. This is my last hurrah, yeah?”

“I know, and, like, I tried? That was so much coke, dude. And I’m just—it’s all a lot, you know? And I kinda just wanna be in my own bed right now?”

It was only three o’clock. Tom hadn’t seen any of the others in a few hours, and he honestly didn’t think they’d be lucid enough to notice if Tom and Greg cut out early. He’d already had his bachelor’s BJ anyway—no regrets. Greg was tired, and Tom was feeling rather magnanimous after securing his jealousy, not to mention the interest of a hot blonde, and in front of Roman no less.

“Fine, buddy,” Tom said. “I’ll call us a cab.”

Greg whimpered. “I’m supposed to watch out for Ken.”

“You’re not, though, man. When was the last time you even saw Kendall? Repeat after me: I am not my cousin’s keeper.”

“Dude, but Logan specifically asked me to.”

“Since when do we do favors for Logan?”

“Since he’s my uncle, and holds, like, significant sway over my employment opportunities? And since Kendall appears to basically have a death wish?”

“Fine, but listen, are you really helping now? Don’t you think you did enough when you snorted four fat lines on his behalf?” Tom waved a hand in front of Greg’s face. “Can you even see well enough to look for him right now? Do you even have enough fucking attention span to remember that you’re supposed to be looking for him? You were literally just sitting here, Greg, _not_ looking for him, until I came over. Maybe you’re just trying to make me jealous of your loyalties, huh, is that it?”

“Dude, no, that’s not it at all. You’re right, I know, I just—I just feel bad. I at least wanted to be, like, available?”

“Greg, Kendall doesn’t want to be found. He doesn’t want to be watched. He made you take drugs you didn’t want to take so he could get away from you. Yeah? And good fucking luck finding him in a coked-up game of hide and seek. Kendall’s got years of experience on you in that game.”

Greg set his head down on the bar, arms swinging down loose from his shoulders. “Fine! Fine. Just call the cab already.”

Tom knocked back one last gin and tonic before the cab arrived, and he pulled Greg across the backseat to sit right in the middle. Greg leaned his head against Tom’s shoulder, trying to stay out of the rear-view mirror, and Tom put a hand on his thigh, ignoring the sliver of sobriety deep in his brain that was screeching at him to keep his hands to himself.

Greg’s body was so spartan—in places it felt like he had barely enough flesh to cover those long bones. His body's fullness gathered more between joints, at his belly, where Tom was more accustomed in Shiv's body to feeling the hard edges of hips and ribs and elbows rounded off, smooth. And yet Greg's spareness accentuated a sort of graceless femininity, the narrow hips flaring out beneath the waist, the soft, pragmatic tits and ass to match, firm when he flexed them and then loose when he relaxed, alluring in their austerity.

In the apartment, Tom sat on the edge of Greg’s bed and watched her undress, tossing her clothes in a pile on the floor. She got into bed in just briefs and socks, folding bony knees under the sheets. Tom filled a glass with water, set it on her nightstand, and sat back down on the edge of the bed. He’d never spent the night with Greg, hadn’t intended to start now. But Greg’s worry about Kendall was wearing off on him, along with the fact that if Tom went home he’d be in bed alone, which didn’t seem like a very triumphant way to end an otherwise stellar bachelor party.

It’d be shitty not to stick around and make sure Greg was fine. Tom hadn’t drug-sat anyone in ages, had no idea about the potential side effects of coke, but surely there were some or Greg wouldn’t have been so freaked out about Kendall. Fuck Kendall, though, for pushing his destructive habits on Greg this way.

Greg had passed out asleep, and Tom riffled through her drawers for something to sleep in. Greg might have had a shirt that would fit him, but Tom didn’t think he’d find it in the dark, so he settled for a pair of ratty sweatpants with a drawstring. The elastic cracked as he pulled them on. Greg didn’t wake up when Tom jostled her over to make room for himself in the bed, and he settled in on his back, the sound of Greg’s breathing and the tail-end of drunkenness dropping him off easy into sleep.

Tom woke up with a smack on the cheek, Greg’s sleepy flail-stretching taking both of them by surprise.

“You stayed over?” Greg said, and rolled the rest of the way over to fling an arm and a leg across Tom’s torso.

“It’d look shitty if my assistant overdosed in their sleep after my own bachelor party.”

“Does that happen?”

“Doesn’t matter. It didn’t. So you’re welcome, Gregory.”

“Did you bachelor party meet all your hopes and dreams?”

“I had to leave early because my assistant got hopped up on illicit drugs, but—”

Greg interrupted him: “You know what it was missing?” she asked, her arm tightening across his chest, hips shifting forward to rub against him.

“Please enlighten me, Greg.”

“Somebody to sit on your cock,” Greg said, rubbing her nose above Tom’s armpit. “Wouldn’t that just, like, make it?”

Tom shoved her thigh off and she brought it right back up. “You’re breaking several rules right now, Greg. In fact, all of the rules that currently apply.”

Greg bent her head and sucked Tom’s nipple into her mouth, her thigh a firm pressure on his hardening dick and her own erection grinding against his hip. Tom cursed himself for sleeping there, for not finding a shirt to sleep in; if he hadn’t been in a bed, hadn’t been still half-asleep, maybe his brain wouldn’t have been quite so inclined to recall this image from his weeks-ago dream. And now it was going to be the thing that broke him.

“Come here, buddy,” Tom said, tugging Greg’s arm and sitting up at once so that Greg sat between his legs, her back narrow against his broad chest. Touching Greg wasn’t strictly part of the deal, but the deal was that Tom took what he wanted, and right now he wanted to touch Greg. And anyway it was his bachelor party; he had in fact been specifically instructed to do something he’d never want to tell Shiv about. So.

Tom waited while Greg stripped, dug lube out from her nightstand. He braced an arm across her chest, fingers tucked against her ribs, and slicked a hand down her dick, her taint, her ass.

“I’m not going to fuck you,” he said, stroking her cock.

Greg held onto his arm across her chest. “But just—you can just say you will. You don’t have to mean it.”

“I’m not going to fuck you,” he said against her ear, a fingertip teasing her ass so that she arched her back. He held her still, crossed his ankles over her feet. Greg whined when he moved his hand back up to her cock; Tom thrust his hips forward to press his own erection against her spine.

“You’ll never feel this cock in your ass, Greg. How do you like that? Do you hate it?” He stroked her faster and she reached back to hold onto his head. He sucked hard on the muscle above her shoulder, looking down at her thin smooth chest, so in contrast with his forearm, toned and covered in fine dark hair—and in contrast even with her own body, that girlish smoothness at odds with the rigidity of her cock and the thick soft stubble around it.

“I hate it,” she said, but her thighs shook and her hips began to stutter.

Tom bit her earlobe, said, “Good girl,” quiet against her neck, and she whimpered and gripped his hair through her orgasm.

Greg extracted herself from his lap, and Tom dressed. Greg sat naked on the bed, legs crossed, when he got back.

“I hate it that, like, somebody else got to put their mouth on you. I know it was your party or whatever, but.”

“Careful, Gregory.”

“But, like, did you have to rub it in my face, though? You know? Like, was that really necessary?”

“I’ll see you Monday, Greg,” Tom said, and let himself out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I talk a lot in general in this fic about finding femininity/masculinity in different bodies, because I think elements of both as we think of them traditionally can be found in any body, depending on how you look at it. I have this fear that this will come across as gender essentializing or reinforcing binary notions of gender, but my intent really is to blur the lines instead of upholding them, and to highlight the beauty in that ambiguity, because femininity in the masculine and vice versa is so often seen as this sort of monstrous or perverse thing. Anyway. hopefully that's all coming through on its own but just to clarify
> 
> as always you can find me on [tumblr](https://van1lla-v1lla1n.tumblr.com/) to ask about tag additions/revisions. you can also just like send me your Hashtag Gender Thoughts, i love that shit


	6. the bruise

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tom doesn't feel like moping away his post-bachelor-party hangover alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “How the familiar can be so jarring. How the familiar can be the worst sense of displacement. Sometimes I think desire is the same thing as being haunted.” –Mattilda Berstein Sycamore, _The Freezer Door_
> 
> (cw for tom's not-so-charitable thoughts about greg's gender)

On the way home from Greg’s, the day after his bachelor party, Tom developed an atrocious fucking headache. He tottered around at home for a while, made himself some whole wheat toast and scrambled eggs and coffee and tried to work off a little bit of his hangover by taking Mondale on a run. But Shiv was still gone on her trip, and he was lonely, and he could only distract himself from thinking about what she might be doing for so long.

He decided he’d just go back to Greg’s, ignoring the hypocrisy of that. He wasn’t even horny—he just wanted somebody to talk to, maybe somebody to croon over his headache. Maybe that made it worse, that Greg was his first choice for those ailments too. But Greg didn’t complain when he showed up; Tom hadn’t even texted ahead.

He sat down without even hesitating on Greg’s questionable couch and instantly felt settled, but the loud sigh he heard himself let out immediately unsettled him again.

* * *

Tom woke up the next day even achier, except not in his head, just in his neck and shoulder and his knee and hip where they’d been pressed against the floor for god knows how long. He was sweltering, under a comforter, on the floor, his body wrapped around a mostly naked Greg. Incomprehensibly Tom was still wearing all his clothes, his belt cutting into his waist and his collar wrenched taut the wrong way around his neck. His forearm underneath his rolled-up sleeve was tacky against Greg’s sweaty torso, his hand cupped around her dick.

He tried to roll to his back to sit up, but Greg’s hand was gripped tight around his wrist, so he just laid there and fidgeted to straighten his collar, pulling his shirt out from underneath him, hoping a little viciously that his movements would force Greg awake.

He tried to play back the night before, but it came back spotty. He remembered coming over to Greg’s, lonely and dejected, and complaining about all the fluorescent lights in Greg’s apartment. Greg had switched everything off except a shaded lamp, had sat next to him on the couch, legs crossed, and massaged the bones in Tom’s face and at the base of his skull with long firm fingers until Tom’s spine melted and his headache faded.

Greg had offered to smoke him out; Tom remembered complaining about the contraband vibe of his drug paraphernalia. But he’d let Greg set a thumb on his chin to steady his head and blow smoke into his mouth. Greg had told him it was a sign of success to cough as much as he had, but Tom still felt a sting of embarrassment about it. Wasn’t he supposed to be the mentor? Not that he particularly wanted to be an adviser on topics of illicit drug use.

Greg had been dressed in a chunky cardigan and a thin t-shirt that draped across his collarbone, and Tom had made some jab about his fashionista glow-up. Greg had just smiled at him blissfully from his hookah-caterpillar cloud and said he liked how Tom dressed, that it suited him to be so boxy and manly, the platonic ideal of the businessman. Tom remembered _boxy_ first, and frowned, and then thought of _manly_ , of _ideal_ , as if he embodied something to be lived up to. Greg made it sound like Tom was a member of some club she’d never have access to.

There on the floor, Greg shifted her ass back against Tom, brought Tom’s hand up to her mouth, setting his fingers over her barely open lips. Tom willed his libido back, to make this feel normal, acceptable, but his dick stayed soft in his wrinkled, sweaty clothes. Instead he felt something absurdly akin to contentment in his chest, at just lying there on the floor with Greg’s body tucked up against his.

But he didn’t know how he’d gotten there—if he’d chosen it, if Greg had—and there was a distinct discomfort in that not knowing. Tom’s shoulders stiffened then, and when Greg’s hand finally loosened around his wrist, Tom got up, hoping Greg had some kind of coffeemaker. Greg sat up against the couch, watching him bleary-eyed with the comforter wrapped around her shoulders, a bruise the shape of Tom's mouth peeking out on one side. She didn’t speak until Tom brought him back a cup of coffee.

“Morning,” Greg said. “Thanks for this.”

“Care to explain why I awoke to find myself fully clothed on your crumb-ridden carpet, Gregory?”

“Dude, I tried to tell you you’d be mad about your clothes getting all wrinkled but you wouldn’t listen. It seems you’re very, um, particular? When you’re high?”

“And the floor?”

“You got couch-locked for a while, after we smoked? I guess I gave you a little too much. Sorry about that. But—”

“What you mean, _couch-locked_ , Greg?”

“Oh, it’s not bad. You were just, like, super relaxed. You know? Not like catatonic, but just, like, so chill? It was really nice, actually. We just, like, hung out for a while. But anyway you were complaining that you wanted to get up and also that you didn’t want to get up, so when you finally got to the floor you were like, ‘No, I can’t go back up there, I’ll never get off the couch again.’ And then you fell asleep down there? And I didn’t want to leave you alone, just because I know you’re not used to being high, and I was afraid you’d like wake up and freak out. So. Again. I tried to tell you about the clothes. But you were like, ‘No, you can’t take my armor from me, Gregory, I can’t be seen naked with you,’ or something.”

“Okay, I think that’s enough quoting stoned Tom now, thank you.” Tom shifted on the couch, moaning internally about the state of his clothes. “God, I need to get out of here. But I look like a fucking breakdown waiting to happen.”

“You can shower, if you want.”

“Thanks but no thanks, fuckface. I’m not going to give myself a chemical burn with your dollar-store soap just to put the same clothes back on anyway.”

“I’ll get you some of mine,” Greg said, and Tom snorted. “I have something that’ll fit, I think,” Greg said.

“No sweatpants,” Tom said, pointing at him, and Greg shoved a towel into his hands and shut him in the bathroom. Greg's robe was hanging on the back of the door, and Tom leaned his head against it, telling himself how exhausted he was, how he just needed to stand there alone and quiet for a minute. But he was inhaling deep and guilty when Greg knocked, right next to Tom's head, and Tom jumped back.

"Can you, like, transfer my robe out?" Greg asked, and Tom shoved it through the cracked-open door and shut it again hurriedly. When he reemerged fifteen minutes later wrapped in a towel, Greg was waiting on the couch with a stack of folded fabric.

“You’ll have to wear your own pants, I think,” Greg said, eyes flicking between Tom’s face and his chest and his shoulders. Greg stood up, the clothes bundled in his arms, and leaned down and licked Tom’s collarbone, tongue cool on shower-hot skin. Tom stared at him, tongue feeling swollen in his mouth.

“There was, um . . . you had water,” Greg said.

“I have a towel, Greg.”

“Sure, but it just seemed like it was in use, or whatever.” He handed Tom the clothes—a t-shirt and boxer briefs in soft material, thankfully something that would cut down a little over his thighs, because even if Greg could pull off the briefs and look somehow adorably sexy, Tom’s square ass definitely could not. There was also a thick cardigan, gray, with a fold-down collar. Tom doubted it would fit his shoulders, but it did, even if the t-shirt was tighter than he preferred. And Greg just stood there and watched him dress, almost appraising. Tom had never been fully naked in front of him—Greg had never seen his dick soft—and he pulled on the clothes too fast, still damp.

“You look cozy,” Greg said, tugging the collar of the cardigan toward the center of Tom’s chest, letting his hand drift down the thin fabric of the t-shirt after. “It’s nice.” Tom frowned.

Greg tried to put Tom’s clothes in a plastic grocery bag but Tom waved him off. “I’m not fucking carrying that. I’ll just get them later.”

At the door Greg hesitated, reached out and took Tom’s shoulders in his hands, and leaned down haltingly and slid his face from Tom’s cheek down the side of his neck, pulling him against his chest in neither a kiss nor a hug. Tom felt himself leaning into it, and wanted to put his arms around Greg, only to ease the awkwardness, he told himself, but instead he pulled away and opened the door himself, tossing a “Sayonara, Gregory,” behind him as he went.

* * *

When Shiv got home later that evening, after dinner, she was in a bit of a mood, stressed and a little testy because of it, and worried, she said, because she wasn’t certain about leaving Joyce’s campaign, wasn’t certain how well she’d fit in with Gil’s team. She said the weekend had gone fine—Tom felt guilty that maybe she hadn’t enjoyed her last hurrah as much as he’d enjoyed his.

He coddled her, made her tea to drink in bed, and lay next to her with his head in her lap as she drank it, reading something on her tablet. She was wearing linen sleep shorts, a ribbed modal top that flowed between her tits and across her waist, and Tom rubbed her thighs with one hand, waiting for her to shift to let his thumb brush between them. They hadn’t fucked in months, since even before they got engaged, and Tom was a little hesitant. Normally he wasn’t: he’d just ask and hope for a yes and move on if he didn’t get it, but he’d dulled his own need, and Shiv’s repeated rejections had worked to wear down his moxie.

It felt like a failing that he wasn’t turned on, that he finally had his fiancée in bed after months of nights on their own and one of them being too tired or too busy or too _whatever_ to fuck. But he just wasn’t. He hadn’t been horny at Greg’s and he wasn’t horny now. Maybe he could work himself up to it; maybe, anyway, he could do a little something for Shiv, to help her feel better after a hard weekend. He didn’t need to be turned on himself to do that anyway.

And she did shift a little, bending a knee to let his hand drift farther up her thigh, and he slid his fingers lightly up the seam of her shorts, listening for her soft sound of approval. She kept reading, but she didn’t tell him to stop, so he repositioned himself between her legs, trying not to jostle her. Resting on his elbows, he smoothed both hands up her thighs, sliding up the hem of her shorts.

He moved to press his mouth open over her clothed cunt, and when his shadow shifted with him he saw a bruise on her upper thigh, near the tendon he always avoided because it tickled her so much. That bruise round and bright, flecked red in the middle, a bite. He set his head down on her other thigh and just lay there, looking at it, glad Shiv wasn’t paying attention anyway.

A rough weekend, indeed. Tom wondered if he’d ever bitten her there, if he’d ever bitten her at all, or if he’d always been too scared to do it, too worried she’d yelp and kick him off, the way she did when he tried to tease and pin her down.

He wanted to set his own mouth over the bruise, see if it matched. He remembered the first time they’d been together, how he’d kissed her neck, gotten really into it, how she’d moaned so loudly but pushed him firmly off at the same time, thinking first of appearances, of the next day. And that was the thing about Shiv, right—she put up such a tough façade, but she bruised so, so easily.

He set a casual peck of a kiss on her thigh, down near the knee, and eased back over to his own side of the bed. She reached over and patted the side of his head absently when he curled up next to her, her tablet still held up to her face. And if she wasn’t invested enough to wonder what he was doing, whether he intended to continue, he might as well just go to sleep. No point trying to work himself up for her if it wouldn’t do anything to help her mood anyway.

Tom turned off his own lamp, but Shiv didn’t get the hint and kept hers on, even though she could’ve read perfectly well with the backlight on her tablet. So Tom just laid there in the too-bright room and brooded, his mood bubbling into a subdued fury.

Greg was probably feeling pretty pleased with himself, having coerced Tom into rubbing him off and then sleeping over, not once but twice. What had Tom been thinking, letting Greg pull one over on him like that? He'd been sleepy, that was all, on the comedown from the social high of his bachelor party. And Greg had seduced him with the feminine wiles he hid away under his innocent little boy act, a lamb-dressed wolf.

Tom was annoyed with himself for falling for it. How manipulative _was_ Greg? Was this all just some ploy to seduce Tom and usurp his position at the company? Greg always seemed genuine, but he was half Roy. That was part of the game.

But how could Greg have known how Tom would react to his—whatever his gender thing was? Tom knew on some level that Greg couldn’t have known, that the uncharacteristically impetuous defensiveness with which Greg had tried to explain himself probably implied a degree of authenticity beyond what Greg could’ve faked. But then what would that mean, that Greg might’ve trusted him with something so deeply personal? That level of trust was almost unconscionable, not merited by their arrangement or really any other element of their working relationship.

Instead of pondering that any more Tom chose to wallow in his hurts, let his irritation carry him out to the guest room to camp out with Mondale. He thought Shiv might come check on him after a while, and maybe if she did then he’d feel better. But if she did, it must’ve been while he was asleep. She’d always been reticent to wake him up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can't find the quote now but I'm pretty certain I got the idea of some "clubby" element of gender from Jack Halberstam's _Female Masculinity_.
> 
> sorry for abandoning my posting schedule; I got yanked down into the work-deadline weeds there for a bit, but we should be back to regularly scheduled every-other-day-ish posting for the last few chapters


	7. the cup

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The last gift.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "The difference between the sexes is, happily, one of great profundity. Clothes are but a symbol of something hid deep beneath. . . . In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above." —Virginia Woolf, _Orlando_
> 
> (cw for rough oral sex & orgasm denial after the second break)

Tom shoved his way into Greg’s apartment with a box of Talisker Storm and two tissue-wrapped lowball glasses in a tote bag.

“Ready for happy hour, Greg?” Tom tried to hide his double-take at Greg’s attire, a dark green shirtdress down to just below his knees. Waist up he could’ve been any fifties-era pretty boy, collar buttoned up tight and short sleeves pegged up above small biceps, but below that a straight skirt wafted around his long legs.

“Um, okay?” Greg said, fidgeting with the button at his waist. Tom felt confused—he wanted to hate the dress, but he didn’t. The structured top lay just right across Greg’s flat chest, and the skirt accentuated his narrow hips without overstating them. Tom looked away, unwrapped the glasses, and set them on the counter.

“What are you wearing, exactly?” he said, clearing his throat. He took the Scotch out of its box.

“I was just—I mean, I just got it? And I was just trying it on, you know—wasn’t expecting you. I can change if it’s making you—”

Tom grabbed his wrist before he could walk out and dropped it. “It’s not making me anything.” He reached up and unbuttoned the top few buttons, brushed his fingers over the red mark where the collar had set tight around Greg’s throat. “There. How does that feel?” Tom asked. Greg’s Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. Tom smoothed his hands down the front, over Greg’s chest and ribs, appraising, said, “It suits you.”

Greg touched the bit of chest Tom had exposed. “This is what I’d—like, it seems business appropriate, right? But it’s against corporate dress code, so.”

“Maybe the dress code for men,” Tom said, and Greg tilted his head.

“But that’s how, I mean, like, that’s obviously how I’m seen. You’ve met my family, Tom.”

“Right.” Tom said slowly, frowning. “Well, chop chop. Pour us some glasses, Greg.”

“But what is, um—is there an occasion, perhaps?”

“It’s Scotch, Greg. The occasion is it’s time to level up your education. Move along, now. Let’s see those pouring skills.”

“How much do I do?”

“You tell me.”

Greg poured the first glass slow, glancing up at Tom to judge his reaction and threatening to spill in the distraction. When he’d filled it nearly halfway without indication of stopping, Tom held out a hand, leaning abruptly forward.

“Okay, stop! Stop. That’s plenty. Just—split that between them.”

“Sorry. But I just thought you’d, like—‘thanks,’ or whatever, like you do with the cheese grinder at Italian places.”

Tom barked out a laugh. “Olive Garden is not _Italian_ , Greg.

“No? I mean . . . right. Okay.”

“Anyway. Take a sip. You can smell it first. See what you think. Gather your initial tasting notes in your mind.”

Greg sniffed his glass loudly and Tom winced.

“Okay, but not—not like that, Greg. Not so . . . doggy. Just a delicate sniff.”

Greg pursed his lips, raised his eyebrows, tried again, and took a sip. He held the glass away after with a little cough.

“So?” Tom prompted.

“So what?”

“So tell me what you think. Narrate your gustatory impressions, Gregory.”

“Um . . . I think? It tastes kind of like a burned old tire? That somebody fished out of a lake and soaked in, like, grain alcohol?”

“Okay,” Tom said, shaking his head. “No. Perhaps—perhaps someone set an ancient cypress bog aflame, hmm? Left it to smolder in your loins? Taste. Consider.” Tom waved his hands and Greg took another sip, grimacing.

“That’s _peat_ , Greg. Call it _peaty._ Not a fucking burned old tire. That’s the warm salty spray on your face—” Greg choked and Tom slapped his back. “Shut up. The spray on your face as you stand on the cape with your forbidden lover. Imagine it, Greg. Are the dark juices working you to a saint’s kept body? Feel that?”

Greg’s grimace didn’t let up. But Greg was the saint here, yes? The chaste, passive eromenos, and Tom at once promising to preserve him and threatening to dissolve his convictions.

“Sip, Greg. Mmhmm. Say it with me now, to the tune of the liquor’s flavor: _I could risk blasphemy, consecrate the cauldron bog our holy ground and pray_ ,” Tom said, thinking, _I’ll consecrate your ass_.

Greg set his glass down on the counter. “Tom, I gotta be honest. I’m feeling a little out of my element here.”

 _Which one of us is the martyr?_ Tom thought.

He sipped from his own glass and closed his eyes, not caring whether he looked obnoxious. He waved his free hand. “Do you at least taste the honey, though? A little smoke? A little bog?”

Greg reached out and touched his face, and Tom tried not to recoil. Greg pressed his thumb against the corner of his mouth, forcing it open a centimeter, and then he leaned in and pressed his mouth open against Tom’s, and Tom’s jaw popped when he opened it further to match Greg’s. And then Greg held his head still with that hand and licked his tongue.

Greg drained the rest of his glass when he pulled away. Tom stood still and shocked.

“The fuck you think you’re doing?” Tom said.

“I just wanted to get, like, the full experience? Tasting it on, um, someone else?” Greg perched on the remarkably unstable single barstool he kept by the counter, his feet easily reaching the floor.

“Oh, is that part of the tasting experience now?” Tom asked. “Licking your boss? I’m sure that’ll come in real handy in your business endeavors, Greg. What, are you going to just lick, suck, and fuck your way up the ladder? Family included? To what lengths will Cousin Greg not go?”

“Maybe I’ll just stop, like, at the present rung.”

Tom looked at Greg’s mouth, reading his face, wanting so badly to touch and yet not wanting at all to acknowledge what Greg had meant.

“And how was it?” Tom asked.

“It—how was what?”

“The tasting experience, Gregory, at the present rung.”

 _It smells of breath_ , Greg had said to him once.

“Do I have to use, like, the official tasting words?”

“It’s practice, Greg. Describe your experience.”

“It’s sweeter. That way. In—on you? Less like ash? But it still burns a little, on the—the ol’ tongue. Perhaps more than one might expect?”

“Uh huh,” Tom said. They were a bit off-syllabus. He wondered if Greg was lying, wondered if he should test it himself so he could call him on it.

Then Greg leaned in and kissed him soft, exhaled shaky through his nose—and Tom couldn’t stand that tenderness but he also couldn’t stop. He kissed back hard, biting at Greg’s lips and licking into his mouth. So much teeth. His hands on Greg’s hipbones, knowing right where they were, rigid just under the skin.

Greg spread his knees and pulled Tom to stand between them, and Tom slid his hands up his thighs, bunching up his skirt, from warm skin with coarse sparse hair to the smooth crease of his hips. Tom held his waist, hands hidden under the skirt, as Greg pressed his hips down against the barstool.

And then Greg reached up and dragged his fingernails up the base of Tom’s skull, and Tom whimpered into his mouth and wrapped a hand around Greg’s throat to cover for it. Greg slid her hands up under Tom’s sweater, skin to skin, and Tom kept melting despite himself, nearly weepy at the touch and the neediness it brought up.

“I want you,” Greg said.

“Stop.

“Dude. Please just fuck me. Please.”

“I can’t. Don’t ask me to do that. It’s not cheating, if . . .” And then he floundered. _If it’s not what I’d do with Shiv—if this is “professional”—if I stay outside, outside you and outside your body and outside my own head._

“Oh, so that’s where you draw the line?” Greg asked. He put on a mocking voice, a goofier imitation of Tom’s that lost its edge: “If my dick doesn’t go past the sphincter it doesn’t count.”

“I’m getting married, Greg.”

“You’ve _been_ getting married, dude. And anyway classically, that’s, like, not an issue, right?”

“Oh, fuck off about the Greeks, Greg. We passed the Hellenistic remit a long time ago.”

“Did we? I didn’t get a memo, Tom. Maybe you should ask your assistant to send me something official.” And there was that acerbic Roy snark. “‘You can lift the bull if you carried the calf.’”

Tom glared at him. “What?”

“That’s the saying, the Greek thing: ‘you can lift the bull if you carried the calf.’ I’m, like, the calf. You’re you.”

“Obviously. So? And? Instruct me, o learnéd teacher.”

Greg shook his head, exasperated. “So, like, that’s how you keep on, after you’re married. If it started before. It was accepted that way, acceptable, classically speaking.”

“Well, that’d be just dandy if we were Greeks, Gregory. Too bad we don’t live in Plato’s fucking cave. We’re modern Americans, my friend, and unfortunately I have to remind you, once again, that that’s not the way it works in real life. You can bandy about your Charles Dickens principles and your weird Socratic sexuality all you want in that peanut skull, Greg, but at some point we have to go out into the real world and be real people, yeah?”

“But haven’t we—I mean, we’ve been real people this whole time. This is the real world. It’s not like it’s suddenly realer because you’re gonna smooch somebody in some church in England.”

“Actually it is, Greg, because now other real people are going to be involved.”

“Yeah, but—”

Tom snapped his fingers at the interruption. “‘Yeah, but’—no,” he said. “No. Real people are going to be actually, legally involved now, Greg. Okay? So just get it through your head that this is ending. And remember the agreement. Yeah? When it’s done, it’s done. It never happened. We never speak of it again. Got it?”

“I know, I know. I got it.”

Tom patted his pockets, made sure he had all his shit. “Keep the Scotch, and the glasses,” he said. “They were for you anyway.”

Greg shadowed him to the door, smoothing his skirt back down, crowding him. “Wait—so, like, is that it, then? Is that just—”

Tom half-turned toward him, hand on the doorknob. “I don’t know, Greg. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. We’ll see, I guess, yeah?”

“Dude, you can’t just—you can’t . . . Tom. Dude.”

Tom tried to shut the door behind him, watching for Greg’s fingers on the frame, but Greg held it open, so Tom just let it go and left Greg standing there, staring at him from down the hall. In the stairwell, between floors, he sat down and put his head in his hands. It couldn’t be the last time, not like that. He’d said _maybe_ because he couldn’t make himself say _yes, this is it_ , couldn’t make himself say _no, I need this_.

It wasn’t the last time, but it had to be one of the last. _One more_ , he promised himself. _And then I’ll quit._

* * *

_One more_ , Tom thought, walking through the office, _and then I’ll quit._ He wanted Greg so badly he was exhausted by it—he was convinced nothing would ever be enough, that he was just feeding an addiction, pretending it wasn’t real. He wanted to think that if he could just fuck Greg that would be enough, that he could stop wanting, but he was fairly certain he’d just want to _keep_ fucking Greg. Keep putting his hands up Greg’s skirt. Keep sleeping with Greg. Keep waking up in mock surprise that he’d slept with Greg, again.

And that was all distinctly out of the question.

 _One more time._ He stopped at the door to Greg’s cubicle. Greg looked up, surprised. Tom hadn’t spoken to him all day.

“Gregory. My office.”

Greg nodded silently, typed out something in a hurry, and followed him. He shut the door behind him without needing to be told, then walked hesitantly toward Tom where he leaned back on his desk. Tom held out his arms as if for a hug, and Greg stepped toward him, confused but hopeful. But just as Greg started to wrap long arms around him Tom caught his chin in one hand and his dick in the other and held him still.

“This is it, Greg. Last time. Got it?”

“Okay, but—” Greg started, and Tom shook his chin in frustration.

“No _buts_ , Greg. Last time. Shut up or fuck off.”

Greg closed his eyes, his head relaxing into Tom’s hand. Tom didn’t kiss him, just rubbed Greg’s cock through his pants until his breathing quickened. But some vicious part of him didn’t want Greg to get off—he was supposed to be passive, after all, and didn’t he deserve to suffer just a little for forcing Tom into such a difficult situation? This whole thing had been Greg’s idea.

He held Greg’s face in his hands, slightly too tight, and then he pressed Greg’s shoulders down until he knelt on the floor. Greg wrapped his hands behind Tom’s knees, and Tom didn’t tell him to stop. He got out his dick and stroked himself to hardness, watching Greg watch. When Greg leaned forward open mouthed, Tom held him back with a hand on the top of his head, the heel of his palm against his forehead, like a schoolyard bully.

“Easy,” Tom said. “Don’t forget the rules now, Greg.” So Greg sat back and opened his mouth wide and let Tom swipe the head of his cock over his lower lip. Tom thrust so deep into Greg’s mouth that he gagged, and he pulled out, apologetic. But Greg caught his hips when he started to turn away, and looked up at him pleading, said, “I need it. If you won’t fuck me anywhere else.”

And so Tom decided he would let himself have that, even if he’d never let himself fuck Greg how he really wanted to, and he punished Greg for it as much as he punished himself in his own head—fucked his mouth hard, so hard that Greg’s eyes squeezed shut and tears oozed down to mix with the spit that dripped from the corners of his mouth, and Tom came deep down his throat.

Greg’s face was wrecked, his eyes red and watery, and his lower lip swollen and nearly split where it was fullest. Tom’s knees felt weak, and he nearly knelt to take Greg’s chin in his hand and lick the fluid-sticky bruise from his mouth.

“That’s enough,” he said instead. “You can go home. Take the afternoon.”

“But can I . . . I mean, I’d like to—”

“Passive, Gregory. Remember? Take care of it on your own time.”

He handed Greg a spare shirt from his desk drawer, stood and watched as Greg unbuttoned his own, sweaty and dripped on. His gaze lingered on Greg’s tiny boy tits, the waist that cut in under his ribs, even now that he was better fed.

Greg shrugged his own shirt off his narrow shoulders and gathered it up to wipe his face, but Tom caught his wrist, not letting himself think about it, and gripped it tight while he swiped his thumb across Greg’s messy mouth, dipping in just so at the bruising center. He dragged it down, pulling Greg’s mouth open, and half-expected Greg to lick him or bite him. He did neither. Passive. As he was supposed to be.

Tom let go of Greg’s arm and dropped his hand from Greg's mouth and turned away all at once, brushing off the front of his slacks, as if they were dirty, as if he’d deigned to do so much as kneel for Greg. He sat down at his desk and didn’t watch Greg leave.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [greg’s dress vibes](https://images.app.goo.gl/tzkTJXx7BjXVTsZj6); also [this art](https://tinyufoboss.tumblr.com/post/640783912983019520/dumping-some-stuff-that-never-made-it-past-my-side) tinyufoboss did of Greg in a Wendy Torrance dress (diff au! but inspirational nonetheless)
> 
> couple of Tom's weirder bog quotes adapted from [“The Tollund Man” by Seamus Heaney](https://www.poetryinternational.org/pi/poem/23607/auto/0/0/Seamus-Heaney/THE-TOLLUND-MAN/en/tile)
> 
> [a pose depicted on classical vases](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pederasty_in_ancient_Greece#/media/File:Erastes_eromenos_Staatliche_Antikensammlungen_1468.jpg)
> 
> [you can lift a bull if you carried the calf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pederasty_in_ancient_Greece#cite_ref-39). (that's a quote from a play, not from the Greeks. grains of salt on the historical aspect here please lol)


	8. the break

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tom tries to kick his Greg habit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Beyond the barrier Maurice wandered, the wrong words on his lips and the wrong desires in his heart, and his arms full of air." —E.M. Forster, _Maurice_
> 
> CWs: sexual advances with questionable consent (both partners mostly or completely asleep), tom accidentally looking at a package of children's underwear at a store (he immediately stops when he realizes they're for children), and tom having some gender-essentialist and transphobic thoughts. i'm letting this tom be very spiteful and lean hard on negative stereotypes/assumptions about gender nonconformance, so please take care or pass if you're sensitive to that.

For the first few days after his last encounter with Greg in the office, Tom called in sick, worked from home—boss’s prerogative. He emailed Greg terse instructions to manage in his absence. But his stress dreams kicked back in. When he didn’t take a sleeping pill to knock himself out, he woke up in the middle of the night painfully hard, plastered around Shiv, a hand clamped to her waist, or humping the fucking mattress if she’d pushed him off.

After she woke up with his hand down her shorts (a move he didn’t recall making, must’ve done in his sleep), she told him it had to stop, that she wasn’t into the whole sleep-sex thing. So two weeks before the wedding he was sleeping in the guest room, dreaming of Greg: laying with her head in his lap, licking his nipples, biting down to his dick. He jerked off guilty and delirious in the second bathroom in the middle of the night, running water loud to cover his stilted breath, and instead of the pressure of his hand he imagined the drag of Greg’s thighs, instead of the taut ring of his fingers around the head of his cock he imagined the hot give of Greg’s forbidden little hole.

Once, he slipped a finger back toward his ass, wondering what about it that made Greg so desperate. He fingered himself but couldn’t get into it, the discomfort too much. Maybe he just wasn’t made to be fucked; it wasn’t something he’d ever thought he’d want anyway. But one night, bored and lonely with Shiv gone, he gave over to compulsion and dug out the strap-on she’d bought for them ages ago, never used, and fucked himself with it, wringing a tortured orgasm out of his half-hard dick.

The worst were the dreams where he and Greg just made out. Lying on Greg’s couch. Standing in Greg’s kitchen. Pressed against the window in Tom’s office. From those dreams he woke up with an ache in his mouth so acute he could understand why Greg had let him fuck his face so hard, had wanted that, even; if Greg had been feeling then the ache Tom felt now, he could understand. He’d never felt this touch-starved in his life—or maybe he had, but the newest hurt was always the worst, right? The little pecks Shiv gave him were never enough to sate, but when he held her against him by the waist and leaned in for more she pulled away, crying tardiness for a meeting or stress or something else.

He worried about his breath, scheduled an emergency trip to the dentist for a cleaning. But even the hygienist’s whole dainty hands in his mouth weren’t enough. Fuck Greg for cursing him with the feeling of long bony fingers on his tongue. Fuck Greg for cursing him with the memory of another tongue’s weight in his mouth.

As hard as he’d tried to keep the boundaries strict, here he was, cursed with the taste of Greg’s skin and spit, within earshot of his wedding. He chalked up the bags under his eyes and the chaos of his already-sensitive skin to typical pre-wedding stress.

He’d recently gone cold turkey from what had been his only source of sexual release for months, so it only made sense he’d be suffering withdrawal symptoms like this. But he hadn’t been this horny even when he and Shiv had first gotten together. Or he might’ve—he’d always been unabashed about his desire, but in the beginning, before this quotidian stagnation set in, his lust had been too tinged by fear of her consummate rejection for him to express it fully.

And somehow, now, that feeling had gotten all twisted up, and Shiv’s rejections only made him hornier, his arousal cranked up by the dismissal. In his mind his own rejection of Greg had turned into Greg’s rejection of him—it’s likely what he deserved, he thought, after fucking her face in the office and leaving her with nothing in return but a bruised lip and blue balls.

Wasn’t he pathetic, consumed by this lust for such a perverse creature, when his fiancée was right here rejecting him, two weeks out from their wedding? He should’ve been focused on getting her back, on keeping her with him, until everything was finalized.

Instead in his mind everything was uncontrollably about Greg—every touch, every encounter somehow a substitute, a symbol, a reminder. He got his hair cut one last time before the wedding, and when the hairdresser washed his hair he imagined Greg’s long fingers, tugging the short hair at the nape of his neck, scratching his scalp. He stubbed his toe and thought of Greg’s knee landing hard on his foot when he knelt down in Tom’s office.

After the dreams kicked in, Tom decided he ought to inure himself to Greg; she’d be at the wedding, after all. He forced himself to go back into the office, shoulders square and jaw set. On the way home from his first day back, he barely stopped himself from shouting down some woman who bumped into him on the sidewalk. She was wearing a green shirtdress, perfectly like Greg’s but with a sash tied into an obnoxiously large bow. In a convenience store he found himself staring at a package of dinosaur print underwear hung on an endcap, only to recoil with an immediate wave of disgust and shame when he noticed the children’s sizing.

Once each morning and afternoon he forced himself to look at Greg’s face and cursed himself viciously every time he felt his eyes stray to her mouth, or to her chest, checking for a peek at her tits under her suit jacket. He cursed himself even for thinking of Greg in the feminine, for indulging that fantasy, for letting it become so concrete in his mind, when none of this had ever been real.

He managed to keep himself in the office with Greg for five days, and then he stopped by Greg’s cubicle, told him to schedule him a flight—early, alone—to England. Greg looked up at him from his desk a beat too long and then nodded and opened a browser to buy the ticket. Tom left without thanking him; why would he thank Greg for doing the minimum required of his position?

Shiv would come out later; everyone else would come out later. Tom would spend the time by himself, supervising Charlotte’s last-minute preparations, checking the accommodations, the menus, et cetera. He’d go on a run every day, as long as he could manage—he’d wear himself out so he wouldn’t have to take the sleeping pills, so he wouldn’t lie awake trying to ignore his unbidden erections.

He’d reset his brain, get rid of this momentary infatuation, remember what was important: being indispensable to Shiv, being an indispensable member of the Roy family, being indispensable at the company. Not Shiv’s probable infidelity. Not Greg, who was nothing, a blip, and ultimately a threat to his status. A little side trip on Tom’s way to the top.

Every element of the wedding would be perfect. He would be perfect. His marriage to Shiv would be perfect. Everything else was irrelevant: a bruise that would heal with time, or at least fade with inattention.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I did intend to be done with this fic but then I realized that I wanted to give Tom more time to think about things. so here's this I guess. sorry for posting a little out of order!


	9. the beginning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> tom and shiv's rehearsal dinner.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "None of us, in a vacuum, is queer. We are each only a small thing." —Quince Mountain, in _Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation_

## later.

After he got back from Greg’s room, Tom showered and dressed for the rehearsal dinner quiet and solemn. Then all at once, in a rush of guilt, he went to Shiv’s room and prostrated himself on her chaise and told her everything—or at least everything he knew about Cruises. He didn’t mention Greg, except to tell her, with a bit of a stutter, that Greg had been the one to shred the evidence, to clarify that all the loose ends had been tied.

She promised nothing would come of it that would hurt him, and when he left her alone so she could finish dressing herself, she gave him a lingering kiss and said she loved him. He still had an hour to go before the dinner was set to begin, and not wanting to spend it making the same small talk he’d have to make the rest of the weekend, he stayed in his room and neatened his things. In the end he packed his bag entirely. _Just in case_ , he thought, without considering what the case might be.

He drank too much at the rehearsal dinner, after he gave his over-earnest toast to Shiv and had to listen to her own lukewarm statement and her mother’s miked-up jabs. He didn’t get drunk enough to be hungover at the wedding, just buzzed enough to be impulsive. Shiv drank her share too, disappeared into corners with Gil and more often with just the other analyst.

When it got late and the general level of drunkenness had risen above the threshold of decorum, they turned on the music and took to the dance floor set up for the next day’s reception. Tom danced with Shiv, and with her he could pass off as joyous the occasional tear that crept down his face. He danced with his mother and pretended to be happy, thrilled, because he knew she would see right through him if he seemed even a little bit off.

He danced intentionally, and rather obviously, he realized, with everyone but Greg, but he directed every partner to end up right next to Greg on the dance floor, when Tom could spot him. He couldn’t resist the simultaneous urges both to be close to Greg and to be as much of a dick to him as he could manage.

He ran into the other analyst himself—named Nate, it turned out—and Tom was surprised to find that he felt almost nothing about it other than some mild awkwardness. He engaged in the due surface-level chat, and though he’d expected to feel some rise of machismo or bravado at interacting with this guy, he found that he just didn’t care. The blasé mist in which he had ended up in Greg’s bed had drawn out into a wisp of tired indifference.

This wasn’t supposed to be that kind of day.

After Shiv disappeared out onto a patio with Nate, Tom decided not to look for her. Just in case. If something happened, he didn’t want to notice.

And eventually he did dance with Greg, just once, after a gulp of wine so big it hurt to swallow and stung his nose. It was an upbeat song, and Tom snuck up behind him and took his wrist and puppeted him around in a stiff approximation of the sprinkler, but Greg went along only by half, smiling down at him sad, and Tom ditched him to get another drink before the song even ended.

Then Shiv appeared next to him at the bar, rubbing his lower back up under his jacket and nodding back toward the hall.

“Could I get a moment with the groom?” she asked with a sly grin, and Tom nodded. He smiled a little, following her to her room. He was a traditionalist, sure, and he wasn’t going to sleep with her on the night before their wedding. But they could fuck, if that’s what she wanted, kick off their marriage a little early with a bang.

But in her room she knelt up on the chaise and said, “I just wanted to get you up here to talk about the, uh, the table plans.”

Tom hesitated. Table plans? No kick-off fireworks after all. He wondered if there was anything even there, between him and Shiv, if there had been anything there for some time, or if he’d just been too distracted to notice that it was all empty.

So he just asked, straight out. “Look, Shiv . . . is this real?”

“What do you mean?”

“Am I a total jerk? Do you . . . do you really want to do this? ’Cause we don’t have to.”

“Tom. All the people are here,” she said. He raised an eyebrow—of all the reasons she could have given him to go through with it, that’s what she’d landed on as the top one? But she went on: “And, besides, I want to. I do . . . I do want to.”

“What level are we on?” he asked. Trust. He just needed to be able to trust her, needed to reinstate the trust they used to share, before they’d both fucked up. If he could just get her to admit her half. “Are you fucking around on me?”

“Tom.”

“Honestly? This _Nate_? You know, I can . . . There are vibes.” _Vibes_ was a bit of an understatement at that point, but he didn’t want to push too hard, because Shiv was going to push back as hard as he pushed her.

“Oh. Tom. What, as soon as two colleagues are close?”

“Sometimes there are rumors, and people, you know, they’re not fucking. But sometimes they totally are.”

“Honestly?” she said, coming over to stand in front of him where he sat on the edge of the bed. “This is real. I’m not fucking around on you,” she said.

“Really, Shiv? You haven’t?”

“No, Tom. I haven’t. Do you want me to give a deposition?”

“Because I have. Ah, been fucking around.” Shiv sat down next to him in confused silence, and Tom stumbled on, trying to wrench words out of himself that he’d been holding in for months. “I cheated on you. And I thought—I think I thought, well, it made it okay, if you were doing it too. And if I didn’t really mean it. But I think, maybe, that I did mean it. And . . . and I thought if you just told me, and I told you, then we could work it out. But now that I’m hearing myself say it and hearing you deny it, I just . . . It’s all just fucked, I think. You know?”

“You what, Tom? You fucked around on me?" She paced back across the room. "You’ve been so jealous all this time because you were fucking projecting?”

“Oh, come off it, Shiv. At least I can admit I fucked up.”

“Yeah, well," she laughed, eyebrows still raised in disbelief. "An admission’s not worth much without an apology, Tom.”

Tom hesitated. “I’m not sure that’s what I’m looking for, forgiveness.”

“Then what are you looking for, exactly? Because the wedding is fucking—tomorrow.” She leaned back against the dresser, arms crossed, face animated and frustrated. But Tom just felt tired, resigned.

“It is, yeah," he said.

“You know, I was thinking about asking you," Shiv said, setting her shoulders back. "Um, since all this is coming up anyway? I did—have, you know, a little number.”

“You did,” Tom said. Of course she couldn’t admit it first. He should’ve expected that—you couldn’t expect a Roy to admit to anything first. To be wrong first was to be more wrong, and that was untenable. But if someone else said their bit first? Not quite so bad.

“And I just think—I don’t think I’m cut out for a monogamous marriage,” Shiv said, and paced. “And I’ve been afraid to say it, you know, because it’s so—well, just _so_. But you know? Maybe that’s something that could work, for us.”

Maybe it could work. Maybe it had _already_ worked, in a way. But Tom wasn’t sure, then, that he wanted to keep on with it. The guilt was weighing on him, the feeling of always being a step behind her, trying to keep up. And an ex-post-facto arrangement felt almost worse than no arrangement at all.

“Yeah, I don’t . . . I’m not sure I think so, Shiv. I don’t know how to come back from this. It just all feel so—so fucked.”

“Tom. Come on. You said yourself it was mutual.”

“Mmhmm. And I feel like it’s been mutual, too, you know, that we’re so unhappy. I don’t know if this has ever been the right thing. I’m not sure how we ended up here, except that I pushed so hard for it.”

“Tom, stop. I was so messed up when we met. You remember. I need you. You know that.” She set her hands on his jaw and he looked up at her feeling almost disappointed.

“You did. Maybe you did need me, then. I don’t think you do now. Not like that.”

“Tom.” Her hands tightened on his face, shaking his head, and Tom tilted his chin until her hands fell away.

“And all this stuff about the secrets, the scandal in Cruises? I tried to talk to you about that ages ago, and you didn’t listen. And suddenly now you needed to know? For what? To tell _Nate_?”

“Tom, it’s not _suddenly_. I just—”

“Okay, I don’t actually—I don’t really want to know, actually. Okay? I don’t. It’s fine. You asked, you’re allowed to ask. But I’m just saying—I think this is too fucked, for me.” He felt like a little boy, sitting on the bed and staring up like this into her face, which was alternately playing disappointed and distraught and angry.

“Tom. We can work this out. You have your little number, I have mine, we’re married, that’s it. Hasn’t it been fine? Hasn’t that been working?”

Tom snorted at that. “Look, Shiv. I know I fucked up—I fucked it, you fucked it, we fucked everything except each other, yeah? But this isn’t what I want. So.”

“So? So, what, Tom?”

“So I’m going to find somewhere else to sleep, I think, one of the empty rooms, and . . . and I’ll be gone in the morning.” He was glad he’d already packed his bag, just in case, so Shiv wouldn’t have so much time to try to change his mind. He didn’t think he’d give in—he’d given in once today, and that had been enough. He was exhausted of trying to make this work, when he didn’t even want it anymore, and it didn’t seem like Shiv did either, even if she was less prepared to let it go.

“Who is it?” Shiv asked, her voice soft but her tone light, faux uncaring.

Tom looked at her, dreading her reaction but unable to lie. It’d come out eventually anyway. “Greg.”

Shiv laughed abruptly, shocked. “No. You’re fucking with me,” she said.

Tom shook his head, blushing. He rubbed his forehead, tracing the bone of his eye socket the way Greg had weeks ago, when he’d had that headache. It eased some of the tension there now. “Please don’t fuck me, Shiv. With the Cruises thing. Okay? I’m trusting you.”

When she didn’t answer, he looked back at her from the door, and she just looked shell-shocked, eyebrows raised, cheeks spotted red. He didn’t know how to say goodbye, so he didn’t.

* * *

He knocked on the door to Greg’s room, suitcase in hand, feeling like a stray animal on some old maid’s doorstep in a Looney Tunes episode.

“That’s my cardigan,” Greg said. And he wasn’t wrong, but this wasn’t the time to get into it either.

“We’re leaving in the morning,” Tom said, setting his suitcase down inside and moving back past Greg, who was just standing there surprised, to close the door. “You should pack tonight.”

“What? Wait, what?”

“I said we’re leaving, Greg. Okay, buddy? Wedding’s off. We’re ditching in the morning.”

“What do you mean _we_?”

“You and me, buddy.” Tom sat down on the bed, just as he’d done in Shiv’s room moments before. Greg’s room was almost identical, but mirrored; it was like he was sitting there facing his past self.

“Well, what if I don’t want to go?” Greg said. He paced in front of Tom, robe flapping around him. He was wearing the goddamn dinosaur briefs again, but at least the robe was nicer. He must’ve borrowed it from the bathroom there. “Logan’s coming, dude. He’ll want to know I’m here, supporting the family. I need that appearance.”

“Yeah, well, Shiv knows about the Cruises shit, so.” Tom let out an awful uncontrolled laugh. “So we’re fucked. I told her about everything, and then I called off the wedding, and now I’m fucked.”

“You broke it off? With Shiv? But, dude, it’s your wedding night.”

“Yeah.”

“And you, um. Did you tell her about us?”

“I did. Yeah. But you were right, you know, about her—about the fact that—well. The cheating, on her side. And I knew it, the whole time I guess, but I didn’t want it to be true, because if it felt true, then I would have to face the fact that maybe it was my fault too, that maybe I wanted it to be true so I wouldn’t have to feel so bad myself. Because if I felt bad for what I was doing, then that would mean that you—that this . . .” Tom faltered there, not knowing how to finish that sentence. “You know. The point is, I’m fucked. Maybe forever. But maybe I’d rather be fucked with you than anyone else.”

Greg started pacing again, flailing his hands defensively while he talked: “Wow, really a ringing—ringing endorsement, Tom. Wow. Thanks.”

“Greg. Listen," Tom said, straightening the placket of his sweater. "I don’t get you, or what you want, or maybe what you are, a lot of the time. But I love it, all of that. And my whole life has been laid out for me in these neat little checklists, and I’ve worked so hard to cross each one of them off, like a good little boy, but maybe it doesn’t have to be like that. Right? I feel like you could help me be real, instead of just a worthless piece of paper full of boxes half-checked.”

“So, like, you’re just assuming we’re together now? Since you broke up with your fiancée?" Greg stopped in front of him and stared, confrontational. "And now you just, like, show up here, on your Girl Fuckin Friday’s doorstep, and assume she’ll take you back? You think you can just assume that?”

“But can’t I?” Tom said, taken aback.

Greg's shoulders sloped and he sighed. “Fine. Yes, you can. I fuckin’, like—I hate it, though. I’m just saying, ideologically, you shouldn’t assume—like, if you were going to be respectful? A respectful person? Which I’m aware that you aren’t. So. Don’t know what I was expecting.”

Greg sat next to him on the bed, close enough that their thighs touched.

“How long will it take you to pack?" Tom asked. "I’m not doing it for you.” Greg's clothes were strewn everywhere.

“Where are we even going? I have things—like, business tasks? That I have to do next week.”

“We’re leaving the company, Greg. What about that don’t you get? Shiv has the biggest Fuck-Tom button ever, I placed it directly in her hands, and then I said ‘fuck you very much.’ She hates me Greg. I’m sure of it. She’s going to do everything she can to ruin me.”

Greg shook his head. “Dude, she doesn’t hate you. She was just about to marry you.”

“She may not yet, Greg, but when she wakes up tomorrow and has to explain to hundreds of influential guests—including _Logan_ , and have you met Caroline?—that the groom ran off with her cousin and the destination wedding is off, she definitely will then.”

“Okay, but I’m still not leaving the company, Tom. I’m finally moving up. I’ve got, like, plans, man.”

“Greg. She knows you were a part of it. And she will tell Logan and Logan will kill us.”

“Not if we kill them first. Listen—I got, like . . . When you sent me to shred the papers? I, like, I kept some? So the deal is we get to it first. We fuck them first. We have our in and take the big enchilada off the menu.”

“First of all, you did _what_?" Greg leaned forward to explain and Tom cut him off: "We can talk about that later. But with what in, Greg, do you think we can take out Logan? _You_? Do you think _you’re_ the in?”

“Ken. Ken already knows, it’s already on his radar, I talked to him about it, like, earlier today. He’ll take care of us.”

“Well, I’ve always been Team Kendall. So that should be fine. Better than nothing. But just for the record, Greg? Seems shoddy.”

“It’s better than your plan.”

“Fuck off," Tom said, bumping him with his shoulder.

“You fuck off.”

“Don’t go getting a big head, Gregory.” He slid a hand up Greg's neck and into his hair, shaking his head by a handful, not looking at him.

Greg shook Tom's hand away, turning to face him. “So what if I get a big head, Tom? You’re, like, majorly indebted to me for this.”

“If you pull it off, buddy. That’s a big fat _if._ ”

Greg nodded, looking away and then back at him, considering. “Hey, you know how you have me sign shit for you all the time? Because I can do a perfect impersonation of your signature?”

“Greg.” Tom glared at him.

“Well, what if, say, I were to slap that ol’ John Hancock on some document ordering one Mister Gregory S. Hirsch to shred some felony evidence? Just spitballing here, but, like, what then?" Greg shrugged. "You know?”

“You bastard,” Tom said, grinning.

“Mmhmm. So I think you better get started on that debt. Time to pay the troll toll.”

Tom pushed Greg onto his back, pinning him down with forearms on his shoulders. “Are you trying to blackmail me, Greg?”

Greg smirked. “No. No no. I’m just saying you owe me. And I think that maybe it would be in your best interest to get me off right now.” He spread his knees so that Tom settled in between them.

“On my wedding eve?”

“Yeah, well, you already trashed that yourself, Tom.”

“Fuck you, Greg,” Tom said, quiet.

“Mmhmm.” Greg’s hands drifted up Tom’s back to his shoulder blades, and Tom swallowed loudly and laughed at himself and leaned down and kissed her, took his time with it. He relaxed down into Greg's body and Greg clung to him, fingers edging up under the hem of his shirt.

Tom let himself feel the fullness of her lips and the patchy evening roughness at her slight jaw and the smooth skin behind her ear. He’d told Greg that he didn’t always know who she was or what she was and he’d meant it; on anyone else, before all this, Tom might’ve felt inclined to box in these characteristics, categorize them as masculine or feminine, and thereby suitable or not, but on Greg he’d learned that they could be both and neither—they were just Greg.

With Shiv Tom had often felt effeminate—to a fault, in his mind, not that his distaste at feeling he appeared weak was any encouragement to stop acting that way. He couldn’t help feeling submissive to Shiv: in the dynamic of their relationship she had the financial power, the political power, the emotional power that came with control and confidence.

And with Greg Tom had felt at first inclined to act out the dominance he saw in Shiv, to reassert his masculinity. But Greg’s easy recognition of the way Tom’s masculinity suited him, even in the way he dressed, and Greg’s existence in an almost fluid state between apparent dichotomies—masculine and feminine, child and adult, guileless and conniving, always both and always neither—loosened Tom’s own need to exist in an overtly fixed state of one or the other.

But the important thing then was that Greg had saved his ass, for that night at least, by taking him back, by giving him a place to sleep in a house full of vipers and companionship when he’d fucked up pretty much everything else he had. He wasn’t sure he bought Greg’s plan to safeguard their jobs, and they would absolutely be discussing Greg’s overt disobedience of his orders, but they could deal with that later.

So Tom spent the night before his botched wedding chipping away at his debt, taking care of Greg how Greg wanted him to for once, and letting Greg take care of him in return.

* * *

Tom woke Greg up before dawn and dressed in Greg’s gray cardigan. He’d scheduled a car to come near sunrise to take them to the airport, hoping they could be out before anyone else woke up. He’d call his parents later to explain.

“Did you bring that green dress?” Tom asked, hovering next to a drowsy Greg while he brushed his teeth.

Greg shook his head and rinsed his mouth. “Hell no, dude. This event was going to be shitty enough without getting bullied by my cousins for wearing a dress.”

Tom winced. “Right.”

Back in the room Greg stopped, confused, and asked, “Did you pack my bag?”

Tom turned away, checking the zipper on one of the cases. “Couldn’t sleep much anyway. I figured it’d be more expedient than trying to rush you along half-awake.”

Greg smirked; Tom told him to fuck off.

They walked quiet through the house, carrying their bags, and luckily didn’t run into anyone except one of the staff rolling a cart toward the dining room, and he ignored them anyway. They sat out on the front steps to wait for the car, huddled against the cold.

“I don’t know how all this is going to work out, Greg,” Tom said, antsy in the wait.

Greg shrugged. “Yeah, like—I’m pretty chill with ambiguity, I guess.” He inched closer, his body hiding the hand he set on top of Tom’s on the cold stone step. And they waited, squinting as the sun cut bright over the far wall but glad for the warmth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you gotta pay the troll toll if you wanna get into that boy's [soul], tom
> 
> one last note--this all centers penetrative sex in a way that I don't love really, but I made No Fucking one of Tom's rules in part to reflect the notion of penetration being an emasculating & therefore negative thing for men to allow to happen to them, an idea that's prevalent now and has also been [attributed to the greeks](https://books.google.com/books?id=kwJsGBzz4tQC&lpg=PT1&ots=qq9oqSOSt3&lr&pg=PT136#v=onepage&q&f=false), including in pederasty, although that's [been contested](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057%2F9780230307254_10).
> 
> so! tysm for reading! this fic is kind of a monstrous assemblage of things I've been reading and thinking about for some time, so the fact of anyone else's enjoyment or interest in it feels like a very extra-special kind of validation. <3


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